Virginia Darney Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

DarneyVirginia

Title

Virginia Darney Oral History Interview

Date

12 April 2018

13 April 2018

Creator

Virginia Darney

Contributor

Nancy Taylor

extracted text

Virginia Darney
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
April 12, 2018
FINAL

Begin Part 1 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 12, 2018
Taylor: This is April 12, 2018 and I’m in Portland with Jin Darney. This is the first interview.
Just start by a bit of background. Who are you? Where do you come from? Where did your
parents come from? And then with your education.
Darney: I was born in Nebraska. My parents were both from Iowa. My dad was at his first
teaching job at Hastings College. He had a master’s at that point in speech and rhetoric, and
then joined up in the war. I was born in ’43 when my sister, Grace, was 2; he joined the Navy
soon after that.
Grace, and I went home to mother’s parents in Pocahontas, Iowa, for the duration of
the war, where we were with our Aunt Virginia, my mother’s older sister—for whom I’m
named—who were kind of handiwork fiends. They sewed and they knit and they did
everything except make shoes, so we had “the” outfits, these two little girls.
Just as the war was ending, my dad was on a troopship coming home, and there was a
polio epidemic on the ship. So, they offloaded the ones who had polio, including my father, in
Hawaii for about six weeks, until they recovered from the disease itself. And at that point, my
parents had to decide where he should be sent to the hospital. They realized that they could
not stay in the Midwest; that the houses all had stairs and the ice and the snow and so on.
So he was shipped to Corona in southern California, where there was a country club that
had been turned into a naval hospital. My sister and I were ferried out to California by our Aunt
Virginia, and we were in Corona for two or three years. During that time, he coached the high
school debate team. My mother would take him there. He was paralyzed from the waist down.
And he went to Stanford on the G.I. Bill to finish the Ph.D. he had begun at the University of
Iowa.

My mother said much, much later that she felt like she had to really push him to do it;
that he didn’t want to do it, but she really was a force, my mother. She had dropped out of
college when they married but to back up, they weren’t living together —she was living at
home still—but she had to work, so she worked while my dad continued his master’s degree.
They got married when he went to Hastings.
So, we were in Corona for a few years and then went to Stanford. We lived in Stanford
Village, which is not there anymore. It was the VA Hospital and everything had ramps, so it was
perfect for my father, who used crutches and sometimes a wheelchair. My sister and I started
school--I went to the Stanford Psych Department nursery school and she was at Castella School,
where I later joined her.
In 1950, he was ready to look for work. Again, much later, after he died, we found his
application folders, and we found these letters that just break your heart saying, “If you would
only let me come, you can see that I could do the work.” And it was so hard to imagine that.
But Julian McPhee, who was the long, long-time President of Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo hired
him, and for that my father was forever grateful.
Taylor: This was . . .
Darney: . . . in 1950 in the English Department. We moved to San Luis and our first house was
two Quonset huts put together, again, left from the war—for married student housing. I talk
about these accommodations that we made because of my father, but it never felt like that as a
kid. He drove, he did things, he took us swimming, so we never felt like we were deprived. I
realize now how difficult it was for my mother to make everything smooth for him.
Taylor: But there was discrimination against him in hiring.
Darney: Yeah. And it was that time. It wasn’t even discrimination, it was just like “Sorry, it
would never work.”
Taylor: Yeah, but it was discrimination.
Darney: It was discrimination. And when the ADA passed, I realized how much
accommodation he could have used that wasn’t available to him.
My parents stayed there until they both died in San Luis Obispo. It was a wonderful
place to grow up. I had friends who had horses We could walk to where their horses were

stabled and we could ride and climb these mountains that surround the town. It was really
quite an idyllic childhood.
When my sister went to college, my mother went back to work. First, she had a job in
the men’s prison outside of San Luis, where Timothy Leary was incarcerated. She worked for a
psychiatrist there; she was a secretary. She wanted to be a parole officer, and in California at
that time, the law was that you couldn’t be a parole officer unless you had been a prison guard;
and you couldn’t be a prison guard unless you were male. So my mother organized all the
parole office secretaries in the state of California and got that changed, and then decided she
should really to go law school.
Well, there’s no law school in San Luis. San Luis is very isolated, which is part of why it’s
so nice. So there were these little fly-by-night places that set up and offer a couple of years of
law school. In California, you didn’t have to finish law school in order to pass the bar, you just
have to take an extra test. So she did that for, I don’t know, five or six years in her sixties and
passed the California bar, and practiced until she died at 86.
Taylor: This was a correspondence course or something?
Darney: Lots of it was in person. They would come up one night a week and do this class. But
then they folded, so she went to several different places and then it was correspondence. So,
she did it. She was very determined, and I think bitter at not having had the educational
opportunities that my father had, and certainly that they gave to my sister and me. In her
eighties, she talked about how she’s doing law for old ladies. But it was an inspiration. She was
quite something. She was difficult, and I admire her. She was hard.
Taylor: So you have the model of two parents that fought for what they deserved.
Darney: Right. And made things very easy for us. It was a pleasure. I always worked during
high school, summers and weekends and Christmas vacation and that sort of thing.
When it was time to go to college, I’d been accepted at Bryn Mawr and this college in
Columbia, Missouri, where my mother and my aunt and my sister had gone called, at the time,
Christian College. It’s Columbia College now, a two-year women’s college. They had a fire at
Bryn Mawr and lost all the scholarship applications so I didn’t get a scholarship, and I couldn’t
go. So I went to Christian College for two years, and then transferred to Stanford, which is

exactly what my sister had done. And I did it sort of without thinking about it, and that’s
obviously one of the things about privilege is that these things happen and you don’t have to
think about them.
But it wasn’t that I had a burning desire to go here or there, or to do this or that, in
college. I was good—I was good in math, I was good in English, I took languages. I didn’t have
much of a social life because I had a boyfriend at home at Berkeley. My mother asked me when
I went off to college—this college had like an insurance policy in case your daughter dropped
out of school, you’d get part of your tuition money back—and my mother said, “Do we need to
get that for you?” And I was so offended. [laughter] Like, I’m going to get pregnant and drop
out of school.
Taylor: I’ve never heard of that before.
Darney: Well, I think if you run girls’ schools, maybe you thought about that in the early ‘60s.
Taylor: And the ‘50s.
Darney: Yeah. So I transferred to Stanford, and the boyfriend was at Berkeley, And I was, I
guess, surprised—I don’t think shocked, but I was surprised when I got to Stanford to see the
kinds of education that other students had had that I hadn’t had. It was very easy to be best at
San Luis Obispo senior high school without really trying very hard, so I was humbled by that,
that these kids—there was a Western Civ class, And I was taking it with freshmen then because
I was a junior—these kids had read the works in high school. And I was just stunned. So, I kind
of wafted my way through college. I did fine.
Taylor: Did the two years at the Christian college serve you?
Darney: Well, they transferred.
Taylor: But you didn’t feel like you were getting an education there?
Darney: Not like I did at Stanford. Right away in the dorm, people were sitting around after
dinner talking about things that were going on in class. I thought, oh, I get it now. This is sort
of what college should be. And I hadn’t felt that before.
I had a scholarship. By then, my father had deigned to talk to the VA and it turns out
there was VA money for kids of disabled vets, so I had money from the VA, too. The tuition was
$2,000 a year.

Taylor: This was about 1966?
Darney: I transferred into Stanford in ’63. I graduated from high school in ’61. And then I had
a scholarship from an alum named J. Winter Smith for young women. “For young women who
habitually abstained from liquor and tobacco.” J. Winter Smith, of course, was a very good
Mormon. He had earned an engineering degree at Stanford, and gave this scholarship to one
male and one female in every class. I thought, well, you know, I’m not 21, I’m not drinking.
That’s fine. I don’t smoke. Sure. So I accepted the scholarship. And Uncle J, as we were to call
him, would invite the recipients of the scholarships to his house once a year for dinner in San
Jose, where we had tomato juice. [laughter]
He also sent out a newsletter—I don’t think it was every month, but it was like four or
five times a year—to all of his current and former scholarship recipients—at Stanford, BYU, and
College (now University) of the Pacific. It was called Wisdograms by Uncle J. And I’m so sorry I
didn’t keep one of them, but it was his little aphorisms about how to live your life and how to
get along in life. After I graduated, he would send me money for my birthday and for
Christmas, so he really kept up with these people. He was a very nice man, but it was so odd.
[laughing]
Taylor: Well, he had a principle, and he believed in education, and it was equal for men and
women as long as you didn’t drink and smoke.
Darney: Exactly. I was fine with that.
Taylor: It’s nondiscriminatory. That’s good.
Darney: Right. I married Philip Darney the fall after I graduated. My sister married that
summer, as well, so my mother was putting on two weddings that year. And I entered the
Stanford Teacher Education Program.
Taylor: But your major was English?
Darney: My major was English and my minor was math. I had sort of thought about being a
math major, and then I thought, you know, I’d rather be reading novels, so I switched to
English.
Taylor: Do you have any memorable faculty that set you on a course?

Darney: No, [but] I had good faculty. I had Wallace Stegner and I had Alfred Appel the
Nabokov scholar I had some really good people. I didn’t feel like I was pushed to do anything,
and so I really didn’t take advantage of it as much as I could have, I think. It was an important
time for me but I don’t think . . . I don’t know. Western Civ turned out to one of my favorite
classes, partly because of the interdisciplinary nature of it.
I’d been competitive swimming in high school and at Christian College. Then I got to
Stanford and the Stanford swim team had been to the Olympics. You know? [laughing] That
was out of my league, so I didn’t even try out for the swim team, but I could swim there. And
Philip Darney, the person I married, was a swimmer, and played water polo.
Taylor: You knew him from high school?
Darney: I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman at Cal Poly I did teacher training
in a school on the wrong side of the freeway in San Jose that was pretty interesting. There
were three of us who then made up one teacher. We allowed the school to release a teacher
to be our mentor there, and then we had a mentor from Stanford.
Taylor: Was that kind of an internship program, or were you in the regular step program?
Darney: No, I was in the step program where you were in the classroom. You had a class
starting day one, so each of the three of us had a class, which relieved them of three classes.
And I got married after like three weeks of school. [laughing] I didn’t say anything beforehand
because I’m, I guess, superstitious. I thought, well, one of us may get hit by a truck or it may
not happen or whatever.
So I walked in the morning after the weekend that we got married—we got married
over the weekend and I was back in school Monday morning—and I had changed my name. I
said, “This is my name now.” And these boys who were almost as old as I was in the back row
went like “Ah-h-h! We know where you’ve”—just har har—and I was humiliated. [laughter]
Taylor: You were 21 or 22?
Darney: Twenty-two when I got married. Yeah, I was young.
Taylor: I remember that.
Darney: Too young. I taught there that year, and then I taught in San Rafael, because by that
time Philip Darney was—he was in his last year of in medical. So we were in the Bay Area for

three years, because he did his last year of medical school and then a year of residency in San
Francisco. And then we moved around a lot.
One of the things that I think is interesting about these questions, and the way I think of
it in my own life is, when did I start to take myself seriously? Because I think up until this point,
I hadn’t—intellectually or professionally or whatever. We were having a good time. We were
ready to move to Canada because he didn’t get matched in his internship in 1968, and was
immediately 1-A. But then he got an internship at the Public Health Service in San Francisco.
Taylor: So it was like things just happened. You didn’t make conscious effort.
Darney: Yeah, we didn’t have to make things happen. Then we moved around; we moved
every year for a number of years, which makes it very hard to see yourself as a professional.
After the year in San Francisco, he then went into the EIS—the Epidemiological
Intelligence Service—at the CDC [then the Communicable Disease Center, then the Centers for
Disease Control, not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] in Atlanta. Part of what
they do is to send an epidemiologist to every state. He applied, and he applied for Alaska but
we got Alabama instead [laughter] my theory being that it’s next in the alphabet! So we were
in Montgomery, Alabama for a year and in 1969-70. That was an amazing experience. So part
of me says, oh, you should have taken yourself more seriously sooner, and part of me says,
yeah, but I had all these interesting experiences by just kind of wafting.
Taylor: Did you work in Montgomery?
Darney: I did.
Taylor: You taught?
Darney: My pattern was we’d move, I’d hit town, I’d look for a job. I applied to the high
school, to the public schools, and they had just been ordered by the Federal court to integrate
the teaching staff—not the students but the teaching staff. I went to the head office and this
guy [was] sitting behind a desk who really did have a red neck—he was this huge white guy with
this huge red neck—and he said, “I just want to know what your answer is to the question on
page four.” So I leafed through the application and it said, “Would you be willing to teach with
someone of another race?” And I said, “Well, of course.” He said, “You’re hired.” He didn’t

look at my resume, he didn’t do anything. So I went to the school, which was Booker T.
Washington and there was nothing in the classroom. There were chairs and that was it.
Taylor: This is high school?
Darney: High school. And I just thought, ah, I don’t know, can I do this? There’s a black college
in Montgomery—Alabama State—which, if you have a dual school system, you have to train
black teachers, so this was the black teacher training college, right in downtown Montgomery.
And I’d applied there in the English Department and I got a job, so that was a relief. I didn’t
have to decide about the poor kids at Booker T. Washington.
I taught in the English Department at Alabama State for a year, and it was a revelation.
There were people there who had been in the marches, there were people there who knew Dr.
King. People in the faculty were connected. There was another white woman in the
department, and her husband was at the Air Force base, so only white people “from away”
taught at this college.
Taylor: You had a B.A. from Stanford?
Darney: I had an M.A. in English Education. I was the first white teacher that these kids had
had, and it was so interesting. I taught them about Stokely Carmichael. I taught about what
the Panthers were doing, what was going on in the world. Because these were farm kids,
mostly. That was ’69. By then the really talented black kids has been whisked off to schools in
the North, so the really sharp kids weren’t there, or maybe they just weren’t at Alabama State.
It wasn’t a prestigious college.
But it was just such a good experience. So interesting. I think we had the only 10-speed
bicycles in town, and I rode my bike in my miniskirt [laughing] through the black
neighborhoods.
Taylor: And you were treated well.
Darney: Very well.
Taylor: They appreciated you.
Darney: Yeah. And during that year, Philip Darney was sent twice to Nigeria for the Nigerian
civil war, because the CDC sent health workers to those places, so I was alone in Montgomery,

Alabama. It was kind of a challenge, but I made friends. I had these moments where you
realize that you just don’t understand a thing.
A friend of mine—a young black woman—and I decided to go to the Messiah, because
I’d seen in the paper that this church was putting it on. So we went down and they said at the
door, “Oh, you have to have a ticket.” And I said, “Gosh, it said in the paper that everybody was
invited.” And then he said, “Well, it’s full.” And I said, “Really?” And she said, “C’mon, get out
of here.” And, of course, duh, she’s black. She’s not welcome in that church. But it never
occurred to me, so it was, again, humbling to realize that I didn’t think about that because I
didn’t have to.
After that year, then we moved to Atlanta, where he was at the mother ship of the CDC.
I looked for jobs again, and I got a job at this junior high. And now they had integrated the
schools in Atlanta, but they tracked them. So the school that had been—I guess it had been a
middle school—now was like all seventh grade. It wasn’t Atlanta, it was Decatur, which is the
next little town. All the seventh-graders were there, and then they tracked the kids. So, guess
what happens.
I go into this classroom and there was nothing there. [laughing] And this had been a
white school. It had black kids in it now, but it was a white school. This was a week before
school started. The other teachers had kind of raided the room. So I went down to the CocaCola Company and said, “Can I have a clock for my wall? Can I have this?” And they gave me
stuff. So the first week of school—
Taylor: Did you have white students or black students?
Darney: Both. Mostly white, but both. The first week of school, it became clear to me that I
had no time away from those kids. I’d taught seventh grade before. That was okay. I had to
eat with them, I had to be on the playground with them. I couldn’t go to the bathroom.
Taylor: Because that was just the way it was?
Darney: That was the way it was. On Friday of the first week of school, I went down to
personnel office and I said, “In my contract it says that somebody’s going to come and teach
either art or P.E. I don’t care which it is, but somebody needs to come and teach one of these

classes so that I’m not there the whole time.” This guy said, “Well, you know, that’s not going
to happen.” And I quit. That was a really good experience.
Taylor: In seventh grade, you were to teach everything from science to P.E.?
Darney: Yeah, it was a self-contained classroom, and I was to teach everything. It wasn’t that I
didn’t think I could teach science or math or art. I could have done it, but not every single one.
And the contract said that somebody was going to come in, so I felt like I was within my rights,
and so I quit.
I looked around for other things. I subbed for a while. One of the schools I subbed at
was a Summerhill-like School that parents had put together, and that was interesting. In the
middle of the year, I got a job teaching English in a mostly black high school, because Atlanta
realtors had red lined, so the neighborhood had gone from white to black in four years. I did
the yearbook and I taught English. There were black teachers there still. There were some
white teachers there, but the black teachers were new.
Then we went to London. So, again, it’s like I didn’t feel like I needed . . . I didn’t feel
committed to either a particular job or a particular kind of work.
Taylor: Were you developing a theory or a support for some educational belief?
Darney: Not at that point. You just go in and you teach those kids. I tried to bring in things
that weren’t in their curriculum. And, of course, as a sub, you have to have all your own lesson
plans because they don’t always leave you one. So I had a lot of things I could do with them
with writing exercises, or activities, or things that they could do.
In 1971 we went to London where Philip Darney was at the School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine. The CDC sent him, so he had his regular salary and we lived in student
housing. We were in good shape. And I looked at teaching, but, because his program had lots
of long vacations, I didn’t want to be tied to a desk job. The point was to travel, so I thought,
I’m not going to do that, so I did a master’s in United States Studies, which was out of the
University of London, but it was interdisciplinary. I think that’s what really then started me
thinking about interdisciplinary work. And it wasn’t very interdisciplinary, it was kind of halfassed interdisciplinary. I could sort of see that, but that was okay because it was an interesting

program with interesting faculty and students. I did my thesis on Black Mountain and that kind
of experimental college.
Taylor: So somehow experimental education was in your background and you had questions
about it?
Darney: Yeah, I was interested in that. It had come up in a class and I was interested in it. So
when we went back to Atlanta—because he had to pay back the time— I went to Emory in
American Studies. There’s this thing at Emory called the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts
that’s just a kind of collection of interdisciplinary stuff. You can do religion and literature or you
can do all kinds of combinations that you want to do. I did a pretty traditional American
Studies, but that was okay. And had a baby, (Blair, in 1972) and got all the coursework finished
before we moved again. We were there for two years. [laughing]
Taylor: I didn’t realize you were so peripatetic.
Darney: Yeah. My mother, again, was really afraid I wouldn’t finish because I was—it wasn’t
that she didn’t think I was taking it seriously, because I don’t know that she noticed that, but I
was doing all this other stuff, like having a baby and moving and doing these things. I said,
“Well, if you’re really worried about that, you could pay for daycare.” And she did.
Taylor: So she did to you what she’d done to your father. “You do it!”
Darney: She pushed me, yeah. [laughter] But I had no intention of not doing it. She just
thought I would waver.
Then we moved to Boston, and I would take trips to sites of American World’s Fairs
because I was working on women’s activities in the four 19th Century Fairs that had separate
Women’s Buildings. We went to St. Louis so I could do the research for that fair; we went to
New Orleans to do that fair; and Chicago, I did that one on my way home to see my parents—so
I could go to all the places that these fairs were and get the original documents.
Then we moved to Portland in ’78. I had gone to graduate school with Lynn Foa. After
we moved to Boston, they moved to Boston, and we found them this fabulous house that a
friend of ours’ great uncle was going to sell, but wanted somebody to live in it until they sold it.
It was a “stockbroker Tudor” house—enormous—out by Great Blue Hill. They paid $100 a
month, and so they were very grateful.

They moved to Portland and—she got a job at Evergreen—and so then she said, “You
should apply.”
Taylor: The Evergreen job for Vancouver?
Darney: Yeah. And I don’t know if she was there the first year or the second year, but she was
there way before I was. Then we moved to Portland, but it wasn’t particularly because of that
job, although it was the first time I ever moved someplace where there was a possibility of a job
that I knew before I moved there.
Taylor: This was ’78?
Darney: Yeah. And then right after I got here, there was a budget crisis and so there was no
job. So I kind of hung on, and I taught a class. That first year, I taught one course, because the
Vancouver program is designed as a whole, but it separates because the students were working
adults and some were part-time. There was a 16-credit program, but students could take four
credits or eight credits or 12 credits or 16. The students could pick the level of their
involvement.
Taylor: Can you back up a bit and give some context for when that program started?
Darney: It started in ’76, so it hadn’t been going very long. My understanding is it was formed
at the same time that Port Angeles was because of declining enrollments in Olympia. The
program was on the Clark College campus and it was upper-division only. It was designed for
students who dropped out of school for whatever reason and wanted to finish their B.A. It was,
as you might expect, mostly older women.
Taylor: Mostly older women, and it was an interdisciplinary program without any promise for a
certain disciplinary—
Darney: At that point it was like, this is it. There’s this one thing. Later on, we did a little bit
more so they could choose tracks, but right away, it was this one thing.
Taylor: And like 100 students?
Darney: No, I bet there were 60, maybe. I don’t know. Lynn was there the first year and I
taught a course—I can’t remember any of these folks, I can’t remember when they were there.
I remember people who were there, like Richard Alexander.
Taylor: There was another woman.

Darney: Gayle Rothrock wasn’t there then.
Taylor: No, she came later.
Darney: It was designed so that there would be people commuting from Olympia, and they’d
put them up in a motel, and then there would be some local people.
Taylor: But there were two stable ones. There was somebody besides you. I can’t remember
who.
Darney: Later on, yes, but not that first [year]. It was Duke Kuehn who taught social sciences
was there with Lynn those first years, I think.
That was ’78, and then I taught there ’79-’80. Ronna Lowen taught communication.
The last year that she was there, they said, “There’s this one visiting job,” so we said, “Okay,
we’re going to split it, and we’ll each have a quarter off, and then we’ll both teach one
quarter.” So they got four quarters out of us instead of three, but it gave each of us a break.
Because I thought, I’ve got to get this dissertation done and be finished. [laughing] So I really
used that as a push to get it all finished.
Then there was a full-time job that year, so in the spring in ’81, I was hired on a
permanent—well, at that point, it was those three-year contracts, but permanently.
Taylor: How long were you at Vancouver all together?
Darney: Till 1990, ’78 till ’90.
Taylor: So from ‘81—
Darney: Well, from ’78, but from ’81 until ’90, I was full-time.
Taylor: And there was somebody coming from Olympia?
Darney: Right. And then there was somebody there—Bill Bruner came a little bit later, but
then he was there full-time. At the end, Justino Balderrama was there full-time, and Bill and I
were the three. Then we would hire a few adjuncts, but not very many.
Taylor: So it was 60 or 75 students max usually?
Darney: Yeah. Well, the way we ran it, I have no idea what the numbers were. Then when the
three of us were there, we’d have a theme, and there would be an eight-credit thing that
everybody took and we’d run different lectures and do different things. Then there would be a
four-credit sort of disciplinary thing—Justino did social services, Bill did business and I did

humanities. Then each of us would teach one other thing. So we were really teaching a lot,
and it was at night. We ran a few daytime classes, but not very many.
Taylor: And it was upper division?
Darney: It was upper division only. For each of us, it was two nights a week, the night we were
all together and then one other night that we’d have our class.
Taylor: What was its relationship to the community?
Darney: I did a lot. I went to all the “animal clubs.” (Elks, Moose, Lions, etc.) I did all that stuff.
Vancouver really wanted WSU to be there, and they really wanted a football team, and they
never really understood what we were doing. The students did, who came. I think we made
some really important contributions to the community, but the community was never very
interested.
We had a good relationship with Clark College. We were in their classrooms, and then
we got one of the officers’ row houses at Fort Vancouver. It was one that’s a double house, so
we were in one-half of it, and then when we took over the other half, Phil Harding was there.
He was there for several years. They had a brick wall down the middle (designed so that you
couldn’t hear a baby crying from one side to the other). But it made it so that if you wanted to
go to the other side, you had to go downstairs, out and around, and come back and go back
upstairs to where the offices were. One day we came in and Phil Harding had knocked a hole
through the wall so that you could go from one to the other. [laughter] He was absolutely
wonderful to teach with.
Taylor: What was the relationship between Vancouver and Olympia?
Darney: I would say we always felt like a stepchild. One of the hazards is that we were a line
item in the budget. Now, when you look at a program like the one that you and I taught, the
cost of that program is really minimal because the faculty salaries come from someplace else.
There’s no staff, there’s no electricity. In Vancouver, everything was in that line item [except]
salaries—the electricity, the rent—so it’s very easy. If you’re looking for a way to save money,
you just lop off that one line item instead of digging in all the other budgets.
Taylor: And Clark College wasn’t paying for it at all.
Darney: No.

Taylor: They weren’t even giving you a break on the rent.
Darney: Well, it wasn’t theirs. We were paying, I think, the National Park, Fort Vancouver. We
were paying somebody else.
Taylor: Oh, okay.
Darney: Two or three years before we left, we did this arrangement with Clark College, and
they put in most of the money for this building, but it was our building with the understanding
that it wasn’t really theirs. I mean, we were in the building. So we got to design this building,
which was fun, because Phil took us through wonderful exercises to do it.
Taylor: I didn’t realize that.
Darney: We wanted to do things that made the GSA in the state just kind of roll their eyes.
[laughing] Because in this old house there’s one bathroom, and everybody shares the
bathroom. Our offices were in bedrooms, and so we were all mixed up and we were always all
together, and we all went out to lunch every Thursday. Not the faculty seminar, but the house
meeting. The staff would come, and it was really a tight group, I’d say.
So when they were building this building, we said, “We don’t want to have a men’s and
women’s bathroom. We just want to have a bathroom with privacy.” They just kind of went
“Oh, no, no, no.” [laughing]
Taylor: We’ve come full circle on that, haven’t we?
Darney: Yeah. But we got to design this quite nice, new building. My contract said that once
every three years, I had to teach on the main campus. I was by then a single parent with two
kids, and I couldn’t just go away for a quarter, and I couldn’t commute for a quarter, so we
went up for a whole year. I was in the 1984 program and we just moved.
Taylor: I remember that.
Darney: That was a big struggle. And after all those years of paying the motel bills for people
who came down and stayed with us, they wouldn’t pay my moving bills.
Taylor: But you were going to be there a year?
Darney: I was going to be there a year, and if I had gone up each week and stayed up there
until the weekend, I guess they would have paid for lodging during the week. I just felt like
they never really appreciated what we were doing.

I always went up for faculty meetings, and I would always stand up and say something.
“I’m from Vancouver.” And I could see people going “Who the hell is this woman who keeps
yammering?” But I just felt like the assumption was that we all really wanted to be on the main
campus; that we applied to be in Vancouver just doing this as a way to sneak up on the main
campus. And that was part of the resistance to hiring somebody permanently down here; that
we would just use it as a way to weasel into the college. So that kind of attitude hurt. It
obviously still makes me get my back up.
Taylor: But in contrast to Port Angeles, which folded because there was no commitment, and
they never had any local people there, you managed to . . .
Darney: . . . to hold on. And I think we did a very innovative way to do part-time studies. So
when the main campus was thinking about part-time studies, did they ask us about it? No.
Taylor: Were you responsible for recruiting students?
Darney: Mm-hm.
Taylor: So you did that.
Darney: We did that. Yeah, we did everything. I paid the electric bill when they turned off the
lights, that sort of thing. And really interesting students, some quite wacky. Their student
activities fees were going to the main campus. Well, one of our students was a labor organizer,
and he went up and they did a presentation before the Board that just knocked their socks off.
And, of course, then we got our own money. We got to keep that money. I think that now,
with e-mail and everything so much easier, I think it would have been easier to maintain that
campus.
Taylor: It makes sense as a satellite campus.
Darney: Yes.
Taylor: There was talk about putting one in Port Townsend, Port Angeles. Vancouver lasted
the longest.
Darney: It’s the biggest population center, too. And at that time, there was tuition reciprocity
with Oregon, so we had some Portland students who could get in-state tuition, which made a
difference to them.

Taylor: What do you think caused its demise? Was it a downturn in the economy? Was it a
budget saving that just was convenient to the college?
Darney: There was one person, who was a mover and shaker—who was in Vancouver --Denny Heck. He was a Vancouver boy, and he was very supportive of us. It was before he was
in the Legislature and moved to Olympia. So we had some good support, but the community
didn’t do it. My theory, which is simply paranoia, is that Olander got something from the other
state colleges for trading. It happened when Olander was there, and he kind of traded us away
for something.
So we said, “We’ll close this campus, but we’re not going to do it right away,” because
our students would have had trouble transferring. We said, “Here’s how we’re going to pull
out.” Justino went to the main campus first because his kids were grown. Bill went second,
after his second daughter graduated from high school. I was there the last year, and that was
Blair’s senior year in high school.
Taylor: And you were taking care of everybody.
Darney: Well, they were dwindling because we weren’t accepting new students by then. But I
was doing everything, a lot of contracts.
Taylor: When did Washington State University come in? Because I always thought it had
something to do with that.
Darney: They came in as we were leaving. They came in with such a huge budget for 20
students. They had like four times the budget for 20 students that we had for 80.
Taylor: And they had this whole campus.
Darney: So they took over that building that we were in, and then they got money for a whole
new building. That’s why Evergreen’s system is so cost effective, because you don’t have
commitments to a major. That means you have to have all these particular teachers, so we
could do it much cheaper than they did. But it didn’t make any difference.
Taylor: But you didn’t have political support from the community, or enough.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And I wonder what was going on with Tacoma. Because there might have been
competition there, too.

Darney: With Tacoma?
Taylor: Yes.
Darney: Yeah. If the college sees, oh, these are the two off-campus programs and are they
competing for the same money?
Taylor: Yeah.
Darney: We wouldn’t win that.
Taylor: You wouldn’t win that, and I don’t even know if that was going on. But I sure
remember I thought closing Vancouver Had something to do with only supporting one external
campus. That might not have been it.
Darney: But it was made so that “We’ll pull out and WSU will come in.” That was all part of the
deal.
Taylor: And it was ’90?
Darney: Yeah, we shut the door in the spring of 1990.
Taylor: I’m trying to think of what was going on with the college budget at that time. Was that
one of the downturns about budget?
Darney: Well, every year was, it seems to me.
Taylor: No, Barbara talks about times when there was money—I mean, relatively.
Darney: I don’t know.
Taylor: It was mostly when Barbara was Dean and a little bit later.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: When Barbara first came in there was a money crisis. But later on there was more
money. I don’t know what was going on in 1990.
Darney: I think in some ways it’s hard for the college, because structurally, we’re not used to
dealing with faculty in a program, with budget things or with anything like that. So here are
these two programs where you have to deal with them with the budget, you have to deal with
them with personnel, you have to do all these things that you don’t have to do on the main
campus. I think that makes it sometimes seem like it was too much work. And it’s a hundred
miles away.

Taylor: Yes, and it’s a discrete item on the budget that you can just lop off, where that
wouldn’t be as possible if you were doing the Native American population or the AfricanAmerican population in Tacoma. This is another community, this is Vancouver.
Darney: What else was going on was that Pullman was really down in enrollment, and they
were looking for a new source. Really, who wants to go to Pullman? So having it be on the
West side was very attractive to them. And they poured so much money into flying people
back and forth and doing all this stuff, and here we are with our lunchboxes.
Taylor: But there was a commitment to the faculty, I mean, the three of you; that you had
contracts, and if you were willing to move to Olympia, you had a job.
Darney: Right. The good news is you have a job; the bad news is it’s in Olympia.
Taylor: Did you move there before Barton was out of school?
Darney: Yeah, but she stayed here. I knew I was moving in the summer. I sold my house here
and was buying a house in Olympia, and that’s when I got together with Craig. So Barton, who
was in seventh grade, I guess—we pulled all the Portland Public Schools contacts we knew so
she could stay at her same school—stayed here, and I came back and forth weekends.
Taylor: When was that?
Darney: ’90.
Taylor: That’s earlier than I thought. Okay. In the long run, do you have good feelings about
Vancouver?
Darney: Oh, yeah. Very good feelings about Vancouver.
Taylor: Are there students that you remember?
Darney: Yes, there are students I remember [and] I see occasionally, people I felt close to. Bill
was one of my closest friends in Olympia because of that. We really worked together well. We
used to go hiking up in Indian Heaven, which is on the Washington side of the Gorge, to do
program planning. We had a good time. And he’s such a gifted teacher.
He said to me, “You think everybody should know how to read a novel before they
graduate from college, and I think they should know how to read a pie chart.” And I said,
“You’re right.” So we taught statistics to everybody. That year, everybody had to take it. Well,
there was weeping and wailing from the students and we said, “We’re going to get you through

this.” And it was wonderful. He’s a brilliant lecturer. And also, they would call him up after the
third glass of wine when they were getting together and they couldn’t figure out the problem,
and he’d walk them through it. And they all did it. That was very gratifying. And that was Bill.
Taylor: Your educational philosophy, or whatever you want to call it, how was it impacted by
that Vancouver experience? Or, how does it stay with you?
Darney: Well, I think a respect for students who don’t look like typical students, and a respect
for their experience and the things they can do. It may have been the first class I taught, I did
this little upfront thing about “You’re going to learn what you get out of it, and you’ve got to
put yourself in it, and I’m not going to feed you.” You know, that kind of student. A student
came up to me and she said, “Have you been in EST?” [laughter] I said, “No, it’s educational
philosophy.”
Because of the age of the students, I felt very comfortable. Many of them were older
than I was, but they weren’t 18-year-olds, and so they were wonderful students. One of the
types that we had were these women who were used to running the PTA, and doing this and
doing that, and being very, very accomplished. So they would turn in things that were fine, and
I would say, “That’s really good, but you knew how to do that before you came. What have you
learned?” And they were furious, and then they would buckle down and do more.
One of the things that I value most about Evergreen was that you could really push
people, and it was expected to really push people to do more than they already knew how to
do. So that was something that I really saw happening in Vancouver. Angie Skov, who was the
Library secretary, was my student in Vancouver. And I followed her to the parking lot one night
when she was going to quit and I said, “You can’t quit. You have to come back in! You have to
do this!” [laughing]
Taylor: Were you sort of making it up and dealing with it as you saw it? To what extent did
Evergreen, as a place that had a philosophic point of view, impact what you did in Vancouver?
Or, did you just create it on your own?
Darney: I think it allowed me to do what I wanted to do because it was an open structure. So I
could develop the way I thought teaching ought to happen on my own. I didn’t get anything
from the main campus about how to do these things.

Taylor: Except for you got the opportunity to do an interdisciplinary thing because it was
compatible.
Darney: Precisely.
Taylor: And that students would be full-time, and they didn’t have to be in a structure like at
the University of Washington, so it allowed a kind of freedom.
Darney: Right, and so I could do it the way I wanted to do it.
Taylor: And you came to the Olympia campus and saw what people were doing and you’d say,
“Well, that would work here,” or, “That wouldn’t work here.” Did you do that kind of thing or
not?
Darney: No, I don’t think so. In that 1984 program, I think they met once a week all year when
they were reading things, and so I would come to some of them. And it’s a schlep, right? So I
would come up and do that, and I felt like what I was doing—I think they thought me a little, I
don’t know, prim and prissy maybe.
Taylor: But you were full-time in that program, weren’t you?
Darney: I was full-time, yeah, we all were.
Taylor: You and John Cushing?
Darney: And Susie Strasser and Matt Smith.
Taylor: It was a good team.
Darney: It was a really good team, yeah. So I think they thought I wasn’t very adventurous. I
don’t know what they thought, but I felt like they thought I wasn’t . . . constantly people would
say, “Well, you just don’t understand.” And I thought, well, I understand perfectly. I’m not
interested, or I don’t want to do that or whatever. But I felt a lot of . . . in some cases it was
arrogance, and in some cases it was just kind of misunderstanding. I mean, nobody was
interested in Vancouver. Nobody said, “Gosh, what are you doing there?” It was expected that
I was there to learn from all these wonderful people.
Taylor: You were invited to join this team, and aren’t you privileged to be able to do that?
Darney: Exactly. Well, not that team really, but just the campus in general, the faculty in
general. But Barbara [Leigh Smith] was interested, and Barbara was a tremendous support for
nitty-gritty stuff, but also for thinking about what we were doing.

Taylor: Did she come down and visit?
Darney: Yes, she came down, not often but relatively often. And I think the place that I felt
most accepted was that whole era when there was a big active women’s group that did things
together. I went on a few field trips, the overnight stuff. But the baseball game, and there was
a community. That was a period when staff and faculty did things together, and that felt really
good. But I didn’t feel it from the old guys, and I never warmed to the old guys.
Taylor: How were the Vancouver staff treated? When you left, they just lost their jobs, right?
Darney: Well, we just had one. Sometimes we had a student aide, but we had Anne Turner
and she, I think, was let go. I know she wasn’t there the last year. I don’t know if she was there
the second to the last year. The last year, I did everything. And we weren’t even in that
building. They had already taken over that building, and so I just had an office up on the Clark
campus. They gave me an office, so that was fine.
I think even after I went up that first year, there were a couple of students still. Because
I used to meet somebody in the bowling alley in Kelso on my way up to Olympia at the
beginning of the week, and then I’d meet with her and we’d talk about her contract. We got
everybody through, which I felt very strongly about.
Taylor: This is a “what if” question. Would you have wanted to teach in Olympia, teach at
Evergreen, if you hadn’t had this experience in Vancouver? Was there an attraction to teaching
at the college? Or was it another one of these things where you sort of fell into it?
Darney: I sort of fell into it, yeah. But I wasn’t looking at all the colleges in the Portland area
and where would I apply to college to teach. I didn’t do that. And so I didn’t know anything
about Evergreen before Lynn Foa suggested and then I found out. But I would have been
interested in that because it felt like, oh, finally, somebody understands what I’m trying to do in
interdisciplinary studies.
Because I had taught in Boston at Pine Manor. I was the Director of the first year of
their American Studies major, so I kind of put it together. I taught with a woman named Vera,
who was also in the English Department, and she’d done a lot of work on motherhood manuals.
This was in the years when people were doing that stuff. We taught a class together, and that
was the first time I team taught, and it was absolutely wonderful. That really primed me. And

also, Vera was the one who really changed my thinking about my work, because she took
herself very seriously, and I always thought that you shouldn’t do that, you shouldn’t take
yourself too seriously. But I realize you’re not going to get anything done if you don’t. So she
was really an inspiration to me. It was the last year I was there, and we taught this class on
motherhood, which was English and history and cultural studies and stuff.
That was the first time that I felt like somebody understood sort of what
interdisciplinary studies could be; that it wasn’t just what I call “peanut butter and jelly.” You
know, Faculty A gives a lecture and then Faculty B gives a lecture, and the students are
supposed to put it together. So, I liked that about Evergreen, that we were part of that.
Taylor: So your values were compatible, but you didn’t necessarily seek it out. But when you
got there, it turned out you could do what you believed in.
Darney: Right. And my best friend here in Portland is a guy who was my student in the
Vancouver program.
Taylor: Before we leave Vancouver, are there any stories or something that epitomizes the
place and the experience?
Darney: Well, my best story, which doesn’t epitomize it, but it’s my best story about
Vancouver. We had this student named Maxine who came in one day when I was sitting at the
desk and said, “I want to know if I can get credit in psychology.” And I said, “Well . . .” and I give
her the Evergreen talk. “We can do this, da da da da.” Turns out she was a hairdresser, and for
some reason she had to have continuing ed credits. I don’t know what it was. Anyway, I said,
“Sure, we can help you out.” She said, “But that’s not what I’d really like to do.”
And I said, “Oh, what’s that?” She said, “Well, I go to the zoo one night a week and I
keep track of”—“I keep track of the motions that a pregnant elephant is making, because we’re
trying to figure out when she’s going to birth, and nobody knows. So are there things that they
do?” So she stays up all night making little marks in the chart. She said, “But that’s not really
what I want to do.” At this point she was probably in her sixties. She said, “I am a belly
dancer.”
Taylor: At age 60?

Darney: At age 60, and she and her daughter and her granddaughter all did it. She dances with
boa constrictors. So we had a party in December, and I said, “Maxine, would you come and
dance?” So she came, and she brought her basket with her snake in it, and she lay on her floor
on her back with her knees bent up, and put the snake like this, across her, and then sat up—I
mean, she had abs that you could kill for! [laughing]—and then danced. This is Maxine, and
she was just a trip.
One night in class, I noticed her poking down her bra, and at the break I said, “Maxine,
what are you doing?” And she said that to feed the boa constrictor, she raises mice, and this
was a litter that was premature and she was feeding them with eyedroppers!” [laughter] She
had them in her bosom and she was feeding them with eyedroppers!
One day I pulled into the little parking lot behind the house, and she was just coming
out to her car and she had a Band-Aid on her thumb. I said, “Maxine, what happened?” I feel
like that’s always my lead into her. “Maxine, what happened?” [laughing] And she said, “Oh,
look.” She opened up the trunk of her station wagon and there was a chimpanzee dressed in a
brown polyester dress. And she said, “It scared the snake.” And there was the empty basket.
“It scared the snake and the snake got out.” And I thought, great, there is a boa constrictor
loose in Clark County! [laughter]
Taylor: You never found it?
Darney: We couldn’t find it, so she went home. Then what turned out what happened was her
husband was cleaning out the car and there was snakeskin and stuff. And the next day he came
and there was more snakeskin. He said, “That snake is in this car.” And he pulled out below
the dash, you know, the part of the car, and the snake had gone up the heating vent and had its
nose pressed against the heat, seeking the heat, and so they found the snake. [laughing]
Maxine and her boa constrictor.
Taylor: Did she graduate?
Darney: Oh, sure. They almost all graduated, because we really . . . I really felt like whatever
they did, it was really more than they had done before, and it was really good.
Taylor: And it was satisfaction for them.

Darney: It was satisfaction, right, and to accomplish that. We had women who said, “Oh, my
husband said I can’t pass basket weaving.” They were really bright, but they had been told they
weren’t smart. And we had a fair share of divorces of women who came and thought, oh, I
could do this, and I could be somebody other than what he thinks I can be.
Taylor: What percentage of the students were women?
Darney: Hmm . . . 80, 75. We had some young students. The young males didn’t do very well.
Taylor: How did you recruit them?
Darney: We recruited mostly through Clark College because it was right there, and the idea
was that it was kind of an easy path, and we made it easy for them.
Taylor: You didn’t promise that they could go do something. They just had to come and do
what you did.
Darney: They could do what we did, yeah. But we could try to make it work for them. They
did a lot of internships and a lot of independent study and that sort of thing. We were really
accommodating, I think, to the students.
That was a change for me when I came to the Olympia campus to see that people said
“no” to the students most of the time. And I learned to a little bit, but I thought, you know—
because they had nowhere else to go. It’s not like they could go ask a different faculty
member, it was one of us, so I think we really went out of our way to help them.
Taylor: Let’s stop.
Darney: Good.
End Part 1 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 12, 2018
Begin Part 2 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 12, 2018
Taylor: We’re back at it. It is still April 12. We finished the story about Vancouver and now you
have just arrived permanently at the college in 1990. Do you want to talk about people that
influenced what you were thinking, and what you taught?
Darney: Yes. As I think about the programs that I taught, it seemed to me that the ones that
were the most challenging—in a really good way—were the ones that seemed the loosest and
seemed the least defined. The first year I was on the main campus I taught What’s Cookin’?
with Bill Bruner, who did statistics; Carrie Margolin, who did psych; it was Sarah Williams’s first

year, she did cultural studies; and Flora Leisenring did a piece on nutrition for us. I was sort of
holding it together, but doing the humanities part of it.
The thing that impressed me the most was, first of all, how rich that topic was. It was
before people started doing food history, so I felt like we were right on the cutting edge. But it
was also a program that was most students’ second choice.
Taylor: Yes I remember the comments. They thought they were taking home ec.
Darney: They thought it was home ec and their parents thought it was home ec. By the end of
the year, according to the word in the freshmen dorm, is that it was the hardest freshmen
program. That was very gratifying because we worked really hard to bring it together, but also
to present them with a lot of the kind of grounding that they need to be in college.
It was a really good program, and I still think about some of those readings now. We
started out with something that was very hard, which was something I’d learned in Vancouver,
which was to give the students things that were too hard for them, and they will rise; and it will
also be a way that they continually come back to it as they learn more and more. They come
back to understanding it in a different way.
We began the year with this Mary Douglas article called “What Makes a Dinner?” And
we actually ended the year with it, which was another really brilliant idea that was Bill’s, I think.
It was pretty theoretical anthropology cultural studies. They had a lot of trouble with it, and
they really fought at the beginning, but we kept bringing it up, and we kept coming back to it,
and we kept pulling it together for them. In working with new faculty later on, I think one of
the things that’s important for new faculty to learn is that as faculty, we have to help them pull
the pieces of the program together, and we have to keep reminding them of the theme, and
keep reminding them of how this all fits together, because they’re learning to do that, but they
can’t do it. So to just kind of throw this stuff at them and expect them—what I said before, the
peanut butter and jelly—expect the students to do that kind of integration. They can’t do that,
so we helped them do that.
Taylor: Did the program have a question?
Darney: Well, it was about what does food mean to people? And we were brought up short, as
so often happens, with this assignment we had about “Tell us about a meal that’s important to

your family.” I can’t tell you how many students said, “We never eat together.” We’d say,
“Thanksgiving?” “No, never.” So all of our assumptions about how they could talk about it, we
had to throw out, and start over with what the students could say about particular ways of
eating, or particular social activities that involve food.
I think the Islands Program is another good example of that; it’s a really loose kind of
question, like “What does it mean to live on an island?” Something very basic, but it’s so rich,
and there’s so much you can do with it. Again, I did the literature, and we had a film series—
started with South Pacific, of course.
Taylor: You and Sally Cloninger, just the two of you?
Darney: Just the two of us, yes. What I learned in that program is how brilliant she is at
designing projects for student learning. We had them doing amazing things that really put
them in good stead for their time on the island when they had to do that stuff on their own.
They had to an ethnography of a place, and they had to do interviews with people, and they
had to do all the kinds of things that we wanted them to be able to do for their island. That
program was transformative for students. They came back after eight weeks on some island
somewhere.
Taylor: Did they know what they were doing when they got into it?
Darney: It sounded fun, I think. They weren’t as surprised about the rigor of the program, but I
think they saw that it was a very rigorous program with this slightly frivolous idea—which, of
course, isn’t, but it appeared that way, that they would just go off and have a good time. And
they didn’t; they did some very good work by the end of the year.
But, not only because she does media stuff—and we taught them a lot of media stuff.
Something else I learned to tell new faculty is to go to those workshops. We didn’t send out
students to the Computer Science Center to have a workshop on how to do Photoshop, but we
were there with them. As a consequence, they love us in the Computer Center because we’re
there to help, but also we can kind of see what the students need.
I think by then even—that was ’04, I guess—all students were comfortable on
computers except the ones who were phobic, and they were really resistant. And that was an

interesting kind of understanding of where students were with technology, and that they didn’t
want to learn it. It wasn’t that they hadn’t had a chance, they refused.
Anyway, in that program— Sally models everything. She does all the assignments the
students do so that when they’re doing projects, then she and I would do a project, or we’d do
it together or we’d do it separately. But we did all the work that they were doing, so they could
see that it’s an important kind of learning.
Those were two really important programs that I did.
Taylor: And Sally was a very important person in teaching you.
Darney: Right, how to design those kinds of things and how to engage with the students. She’s
clear that she’s very rigorous, and they just love it. We reprised that in a one-quarter version in
one of my post-retirements on museums. Again, they all went off and worked in a museum for
Thanksgiving break and another week, so I think they were gone two weeks out of that quarter
to go to a museum. Then she and I did that. She went back to Huahine in French Polynesia at
the Fare Pote’e, which is the cultural museum there, and did some work for them. We both
came back and did our presentations with them. So, she was really important.
I think Bill was really important to me, too, I never could do it, but I just admired so
much the way he lectured about statistics but also other kinds of stuff. He would introduce
something very generically so they got this big picture, and then they’d read about it, and they
would be able to put it into the big picture that he’d given them. His statistics lectures were
always about his truck. The students loved it. But then they’d read the text and understand
how it fit in with the big picture, rather than just going to the numbers, which, I think, for
people who aren’t naturally drawn to numbers, you can’t just start with the numbers. You have
to start with this big picture.
Then I did some film classes. I did another film class—I guess I taught with Sally more
than anybody except Bill. We did a sort of history of American film.
Taylor: How did you learn about how to read a film? Did you teach yourself that? Because
that was something that developed. You didn’t start that in 1968 when you were in college.
Darney: No, I always like film and I always kept up with film. I took a class in graduate school
that was not helpful. But I taught with Caryn Cline and it’s all from Cayn. She has this “How to

Read a Film” talk, and I’ve adapted it in different programs. But I come at it from literature, so
my reading of films is quite literary, as opposed to other people’s, who are much more
technical or media kind of focused. Which is fine. It’s a hard sell for students to say, “This is
something serious, and you can take it seriously. You’re not just watching movies.”
Taylor: But I found current students are much more capable of reading film than they are of
reading books.
Darney: So you have to go the other way.
Taylor: So when Fritz [Levy] and I taught Shakespeare together we did a lot of film, and the
students taught us, because they could pay attention to all that was going on, and I just was
watching the film. They had been taught that. I think current students do see it as a skill, and
have learned it somewhere.
Darney: Yes. You do the same with reading when you read it the second time. When you read
it the second time, Wallace Stegner talked about the “acquisitive reader.” The acquisitive
reader reads for plot. Then you go back and you look at it and you see other things in it. And
they’re kind of coming at it the other direction. They’re seeing all the other things, but they’re
not seeing the whole. So, you have to help them do both, I think, to put both together.
Caryn and I did a couple of times one-quarter film things. We took students to the
Seattle Film Festival, because we taught spring quarter. They all bought a weeklong ticket, and
we went up there and we got a room at Seattle Central so we could have two seminars while
we were there. It was very successful. It’s a good way to run a program, to let them see new
stuff. What we did in that program was we said, “Here are two films that everybody has to
see,” so we could have seminars on them. After that, they had to see at least two films a day,
but it was their choice. At the Seattle Film Festival, they have these things at midnight, you
know, the weird stuff. We’re not going to see those, but they could see them. It’s all right.
[laughing] And they had to find a place to stay. It really expected a lot of them. They had to
find someplace to stay, and they had to manage their own food. All they had to do was show
up at these seminars. And they were writing journals. They had stuff they turned in later, but
that week, they were kind of on their own. It was fine. We never lost a student in all of those
things with students, which is a relief! [laughing]

Taylor: Right.
Darney: Well, we had a little trouble in the Islands program, but it was easy to solve.
Taylor: What about teaching writing?
Darney: Oh, man.
Taylor: You took a big responsibility for that in every program, I think.
Darney: Yes, I did a lot with Writing Across the Curriculum. I have friends here who are in the
kind of curriculum-writing business, and so we would talk about ways to help students with
writing. I’m not sure I know how to do it well, but I think getting them to write is the most
important thing, and getting them to understand that you write differently in different
situations.
Taylor: But that Writing Across the Curriculum, or whatever you want to call it, was established
quite early as a fundamental value of the college. You bought into it, I bought into it. It’s not
there now.
Darney: Well, because you have to keep doing it. I think one of the problems at Evergreen is
when somebody says, “Let’s do this,” somebody else says, “Oh, we tried that,” or, “We already
did that.” And you can’t be that way. You have to keep doing those things that you care most
about because there are new faculty and there are new students and things change, and you
have to able to adapt and not just do what you always did—which, my understanding was, was
the primary value at Evergreen; that faculty don’t do things the way they always did them.
They try new things. They don’t get out yellowed notes. And I have taught in programs where
there were people who were doing things exactly the same way they did it forever.
Taylor: But the other thing is that writing particularly, or certain kinds of critical thinking skills,
because we didn’t have requirements, and because you were doing something full-time, every
program needed to do it.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: Because it wasn’t going to be done somewhere else, and it was part of general
education. That was an obligation. Now I think that obligation seems gone.
Darney: But if you want your students to be able to write about political science, you’d better
teach them how to write about political science, because it’s different than writing about

novels. It makes sense that those are the experts in it, but those are also people who don’t
want to teach it necessarily.
Taylor: Yes, and it’s not just writing teachers that teach it.
Darney: Exactly. And that’s kind of the complaint that English teachers everywhere have is
that we’re supposed to be teaching them to write, and we’re doing these services rather than
being able to really teach things that we want to teach.
Taylor: Right. But you ended up teaching by being a part of teams teaching a lot of other
faculty how to teach writing, just by modeling it.
Darney: I did. And then that, combined with teaching with Don Finkel in the Finkel workshops,
which also really changed my own teaching. The year that he was a Danforth Fellow, I had long
talks with him about it, because I could not figure out how to apply it to something where you
didn’t have a particular answer, where it’s about exploration and about thinking about it. So in
the Shakespeare program, watching him do those workshops was just amazing. I never did
them near as well as he did, but I did versions of them that really got people engaged and
working together, and trying to figure these things out and not just slapping something up. I
think the thing about his were that they were so intellectually complex that there was really a
lot for students to think about and worry over and work through.
Taylor: But they weren’t open-ended because he knew what he wanted them to learn, and he
set it out so that they’d learn it.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: I remember one that was so good. It was Understanding Plato’s Meno, and he had
students talking about it, but there were very leading questions. It was two hours’ worth. But
what you were wanting was much more open-ended; could you make that system work?
Darney: I did. It just didn’t look like his, but that was okay. But it really changed my thinking
about teaching, which was great to have this new way of engaging students in the material.
Taylor: And it worked with literature.
Darney: It did. It just was different than his was.
Taylor: Other memorable programs or people?

Darney: Unfortunately, my very worst teaching experience was my last. It’s not that I quit
after that, it’s that I had already stopped and I was asked to come in. It was a program that was
etched in stone and there was no place for me in the program.
Taylor: And was one of those yellow notes ones?
Darney: It was absolutely a yellow notes one, and it was very disappointing. And it was
disappointing to see the students were shocked when I asked them to talk about the books.
Finally, it took me two or three weeks to get the seminar kind of whipped into shape [laughing]
where they would talk about the books, and not just blather. You know?
Taylor: I wonder if that was just the case that those faculty were tired? Did they do it that way
their whole careers?
Darney: They did it that way for like five or eight years. That’s too bad.
Taylor: That’s too bad.
Darney: It left a bad taste in my mouth and gave me a migraine, which I’d never had in my life!
[laughter]
Taylor: And you were doing a service.
Darney: I was doing a service. And some of the students made it worth it, so that was okay.
But it was a struggle.
Taylor: How about talking about some memorable students? Or challenges?
Darney: [In the Islands Program], when they all went off to an island, they had to do a
proposal, and it was a very elaborate thing. But the only requirement we had was that they
had to have Internet access. This was when blogs were first starting, and so we were the first
program at Evergreen to use blogs. We trained them all how to do this, and we divided them—
it was very elaborate—we divided them into “geo groups” so that students who were within
10,000 miles of each other were in a group. They had to talk to each other on blogs twice a
week and they had to post something once a week. It was all set up. So, they had to have
Internet access, and it was the era of Internet cafes.
So the student who, you know, didn’t fit with other people and was kind of a loner and
kind of an odd duck, he wanted to go to an island in the Hawaiian Islands that was
unpopulated. We said, “Does it have Internet?” And he said, “Well, no. There’s no one there.”

We said, “Then you can’t go there.” [laughing] So he went to one of the other islands and he
fell in with a group of folks who, I guess, live on the beach, and found a community. He came
back transformed. He was social, he chatted, he did this presentation. It changed his life. And
it was so seemingly stupid. It was just falling in with these people, and then kind of coming into
himself in a very interesting way. That was very memorable to me.
Some of my Vancouver students I still think about quite a bit, and adored. I just thought
they were wonderful people. I hung out with Angie when she came up and worked for Bill. I’d
visit with her. You remember Hilary Seidel? Her mother was one of my students down there,
and I would see her occasionally. That was nice.
Taylor: Of the Five Foci . . .
Darney: Oh my god.
Taylor: . . . which ones are essential in your mind, or really make the difference between being
able to do good teaching and not?
Darney: Let’s name them so I’m sure I don’t forget any. Interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
Taylor: [Teaching] across significant difference. Theory and practice. We ought to be able to
come up with them. Full-time.
Darney: We can go with those.
Taylor: We’ll come up with the fifth.
Darney: I think full-time is not essential. I think it’s important, but not essential. I think they’re
all important, but we did it part-time, and we built community and did all the things that you
want the education to do.
Teaching across significant difference is really important, but it’s really hard. For me,
the kinds of differences that, once I kind of understood them, I worked at teaching that way
was class in Vancouver; respecting students for whatever kind of background they had, and
respecting them for knowing. Phil Harding really helped me understand that. Students really
gravitated toward Phil. Particularly working-class students gravitated toward Phil. He helped
them understand the value of the education without losing their backgrounds in ways that
were really important.

One of the things we’d get about literature is “Why do we have to talk about all these
things in this book? It just is what it is.” And he said to this young man, “Now, you know a lot
about cars. So do you not want to learn more about cars? Does it not help you to learn more
about this particular kind of engine and that particular kind of engine?” He really helped the
young man understand what it is we were trying to do over here, based on his own experience.
That kind of difference, I think, is really important.
I’m not sure . . . I know there’s a big diversity campaign or project at the college now,
and I think it’s a really good thing to do.
Taylor: Equity they’re now calling it.
Darney: And I think it’s really hard. I was completely baffled by those basketball players in the
Friendship program because I couldn’t figure out a way to bring them into the conversations we
were having.
Taylor: That was our loss as well as theirs. We just couldn’t meet them.
Darney: Yeah. So I think it’s really hard, and I admire folks for trying to do it. I think it’s a
challenge. Interdisciplinary, I think, is the foundation of the college, and we lose it at our peril.
Taylor: What’s your definition of interdisciplinary?
Darney: I do not think that organic plus inorganic chemistry is interdisciplinary.
Taylor: But how about physics, math and chemistry?
Darney: I know it’s interdisciplinary to them because it’s a big deal, but it doesn’t do it for me.
Leaping ahead to being a dean, I was constantly told, “You just don’t understand.”
Taylor: But then when you do Shakespeare, which might be literature, religion, philosophy and
history but no science, does that count?
Darney: Well, that’s it. I don’t think it has to be necessarily interdivisional. But I think some of
our most wonderful programs have been art and science.
Taylor: Yes.
Darney: With Ruth [Hayes] and the animating [of] whatever those underwater things that they
were—you know, Ruth working with Gerardo [Chin-Leo], or Dharshi [Bopegedera] working with
somebody—maybe Lisa Sweet—about light. Those are just fabulous programs.
Taylor: Yes, the art and science ones work better than the—

Darney: And science and political science works well. I mean, it’s environmental studies in
various ways. But I don’t know that . . . I mean, but it could. I think that’s the thing that was so
important about the retreats, which I want to talk a little bit about, because I think it’s a big loss
to not do those.
Taylor: So do I.
Darney: The “how to design a program in an hour,” which people groaned about. Everybody
always loved it.
Taylor: Absolutely.
Darney: You put a scientist together with somebody in literature and they can find something
to teach, if one or both of them are not so concerned with coverage that they feel like they’re
giving something up to do this, that they’re letting something go that they need to do.
Taylor: But from the earliest days of the college, there were scientists that were willing to do
that—the Larry Eickstaedts and the Bob Slusses of the world who worked perfectly fine—and
there were other ones that said, “We’re not teaching science. We’re teaching history of
science, or we’re teaching dabbling in science, but we’re not really teaching science.” So that
was a problem.
Darney: That’s the story about the very first planning retreat. [Byron] Youtz took all the
scientists off and said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”
Taylor: Yes. And one of the earliest papers that he wrote was “Can We Do Upper-Division
Science at Evergreen?” And Bob Sluss and Larry Eickstaedt refused to go to the meeting,
because that wasn’t what they wanted.
Darney. Tom Grissom said, “When I got to graduate school, and I’d been a physics major, there
was a lot I didn’t know.” There’s no way we can teach them everything they need to know, but
you have to have that mindset to be able to let go of coverage.
Taylor: But he was also a poet.
Darney: Yes, and he was a poet, and he could see beyond the bench, the lab. But I think as
long as people keep trying to do that, then I’m happy. I just would hate to see that let go and
people kind of hunker down in their bunkers.
Taylor: The fifth [Foci]—team teaching.

Darney: Oh, yeah, of course. [laughter]
Taylor: Can you do interdisciplinary study alone?
Darney: I don’t think so. I can do American Studies, because I can do history and literature, but
that’s not nearly as rich as it would be with somebody in science or whatever in the program. I
think it has to be. After I left the deans’ area, looking at the curriculum, there were more and
more people teaching alone. I just think that’s a shame, because it doesn’t take advantage of
what is so rich. To be in a place where it’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” When you come out of
graduate school, when you’ve spent your whole time in graduate school defending yourself
against things you don’t know and never admitting it, but to be able to say, “Gosh, I don’t know
about that. I’d love to know more.” Or, “Let’s teach so I can learn that from you.” That was
just a revelation to me, and it was wonderful. And I never looked back. Just like the first
quarter I taught, I had grades in my head, and after that I never thought about grades.
Taylor: Narrative evaluation—so we’ve got six rather than Five [Foci] because I think that’s
another one.
Darney: Right, and I think narrative evaluations are crucial. And it’s hell. That weekend before
evaluation week is just horrible, but I don’t know any other way to do it well. People who have
charts, where there’s a graph and you get this, which means you have this statement and that
statement, I mean, it’s lazy. Yeah, it’s a lot of work.
Taylor: Yes, but I don’t think anybody does it our way anymore.
Darney: Well. And I think one of the changes in the college—two things that sort of came
together and made for that—one of them is that early founding faculty that’s all male. They all
had wives at home doing things for them, so they could just work and they didn’t have to think
about the rest of their lives. They could just focus on their work. So they could have meetings
that went on for six hours, that kind of thing.
But the second thing that happened 10 years later is people started saying, “I need to be
with my family. I’m not going to put in that kind of time.” You and I did things that nobody else
would have done to do that commuting. And people aren’t willing to do that.

Taylor: Partly [it was] the novelty of the college. The first few years, the college was people’s
whole life. It didn’t matter if you were faculty, staff, whatever, the college was 24 hours a day.
That was unsustainable.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: I think even by the time you got there, that was just unsustainable. And for women
with children . . . I remember Carolyn Dobbs was one of the first ones that said—and Carolyn
had the value that she wanted to give to community as well as the college, so she had family,
community and college—there was no way.
Darney: But the fact that when I went to a retreat up at Fort Worden, there was no daycare.
So I put that in. If we want people to come and spend the night, then . . . I mean, I didn’t have
anybody to leave my kids with. I had to bring them or not come. And I wanted to come, so
what do you do? You make it possible for people to come.
Taylor: You know who started the first daycare at the college?
Darney: No.
Taylor: Larry Stenberg.
Darney: Really?
Taylor: Before the college opened he recognized the need, so it wasn’t from a mother or a
woman.
Darney: He recognized that the people needed it.
Taylor: He recognized [the need]. That’s when the Driftwood House or whatever was started.
I think he wanted it for students.
Darney: I think those—now six—Foci are all really important. The only one I would bend on is
full-time.
Taylor: So, theory and practice?
Darney: Absolutely. You want people to apply what they’re learning, and you want them to
think about applying it.
Taylor: That might not be every program, but over the course of a student’s career . . .
Darney: . . . they should have some sense of that. I saw that when I would supervise
internships, to get the students to talk about not just what they did—that’s the practice—but

what they were learning from it, what the theory was that they were applying to it, and to help
them get out of just doing the work, but to step back and think about how this fit in with what
else they were doing and other things that they knew.
Taylor: Self-evaluation is part of that, too, and reflection.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: That kind of leads us into deaning. How did you become a dean? What’s the whole
background?
Darney: It was pretty quick. I only taught maybe four years on the main campus before I
became a dean—’94, ’96? But part of it was I had run the Vancouver campus, and so I had
administrative experience. And I think I was ready for a break. I came in at a really good time.
The year Barbara Leigh Smith became Provost, I became Curriculum Dean.
Taylor: So you were following her?
Darney: I was following her, but she now was Provost. There was a few difficulties with the
fact that I was doing the job she had just done, but I kind of figured out how to make it my own.
And I liked working with the staff in the deans’ area. I adored Debbie [Waldorf]. It was a good
team. John [Cushing] came the next year, because he encouraged me to run and I said I would
do it if he would do it, so then he was freed up the next year to do it.
Taylor: Who was the team when you came?
Darney: LesWong, Brian Price, Mike Beug, Sara Pederson
Darney: . I think one of the difficulties deans have is that there’s so much work that you just
kind of put your head down and do the work, and Barbara could really see a bigger picture. She
had a national reputation at that point, and a national engagement, but she could see beyond
the stuff we had to do that day. I never got there, but I really admired that in her.
Taylor: What did you conceive of as your job as Curriculum Dean?
Darney: To get the curriculum out for the next year. You know it’s done when you’ve got the
catalog out. So, everything that it took to get the catalog out, and the kind of persuasion that
we had to do to make things happen.
Taylor: The formation of teams.

Darney: Exactly, and making suggestions. Then that was still that big faculty evaluation
process, where before we had the group meeting but it was just one on one, and so I did those.
Yeah, that was it.
Taylor: The challenges, it seems to me, in the deans’ area was that you had no authority but
you had tremendous responsibility.
Darney: Right, lots of responsibility. [laughing]
Taylor: Because if you didn’t produce this catalog with this good curriculum that was
responsible to what needed to be done, it was your fault.
Darney: Right. I followed Pris [Bowerman] Pris was really good at kind of keeping track of
things, but she didn’t go out and she didn’t answer her own phone. So, just because of my
personality, I did a lot more of that. And I did a lot of building bridges with Advising, with
Financial Aid, with all the departments.
Taylor: Admissions.
Darney: Yes, and I think that really helped.
Taylor: But you also cajoled people. You had an idea and you cajoled people into doing it, and
felt it was essential. I mean, people couldn’t go off and say, well, they’re just going to teach on
their own.
Darney: Right. And then once we got the Planning Units—I can’t remember when that
happened but it happened not right away, but soon—
Taylor: That was when Barbara was Provost.
Darney: Yes. And then there was a way to say, “Here, in this Planning Unit, you need more of
that, or you need some of this, or you need that.” But it’s the same headaches every year. We
don’t have enough people teaching psychology, we don’t have enough people . . .
Taylor: We don’t have enough people teaching core.
Darney: Yes, exactly. But then I applied numbers, and I would say, “You’ve got this percentage
of the faculty, you need this percentage of the seats in core.” It worked for everybody except
my own dear area, which then made everything all level and was not helpful to those students.
And I think that those Coordinators of the Planning Units really got it, and they were really
working to—so it felt like it was a team working on the curriculum.

Taylor: Except for humanities, or whatever you might have called it.
Darney: Exactly. And to help people kind of see the whole. I think the problem is that people
could see either their own teaching or maybe the teaching of their colleagues, but they can’t
see the whole curriculum.
Taylor: But the deans never really had the authority to make the curriculum, except for by
cajoling.
Darney: I think that’s right.
Taylor: But since you left there’s been nobody that was capable of the cajoling.
Darney: Exactly. But I think if you give deans that kind of authority, they can’t go back and
teach.
Taylor: Well, and you can’t do it. It won’t work.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: But the culture of the college of team teaching has got to be so embedded, and that’s
what I think we’re losing.
Darney: Here’s a disappointment, which is way down on your list. After I stopped teaching
with that one bad experience, I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a good team and
what makes a good team-teaching experience. I spent a lot of time writing it and passing it
around. I sent it to the deans and the Provost and said, “Here’s some thoughts about that.”
And it just sank.
Taylor: It just disappeared, yeah.
Darney: I said I’d be glad to come up and talk to people about it or whatever, but it just sank.
So if they’re not interested in helping faculty team teach, it’s not going to happen. It takes
nurturing faculty, I think. It takes, I don’t want to say training, but you need to set up situations
where they learn to team teach. And it’s not intuitive for most people.
Taylor: And getting teams together is a real science, because it isn’t like, well, you know X and
you know Y and we need to put these together.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: It’s about personalities.
Darney: As well, yes.

Taylor: Just because you know something doesn’t mean that you’ll teach well together.
Darney: Well, and that you can blend it to be with something else.
Taylor: There was a time in teaching where the effort was to put at least one woman on each
team, or to make the teams diverse. But they didn’t make teams that were compatible. I think
you taught with lots of women. I taught with lots of women. Early on, I taught with men.
That’s just self-selection, and that’s going to happen, I think.
Darney: Well, I don’t think it has to happen. I think if you have enough ways that people
interact with each other and learn to get to know each other . . . I taught with quite a few men,
and taught with them easily, except for that thing at the end. But they were interested in what
I had to say. Of course, that’s a problem with some men, you know.
Taylor: But there have to be opportunities for people to get to know each other.
Darney: Exactly.
Taylor: That’s part of faculty development, and that was part of your job as dean, even though
you weren’t Faculty Development [Dean], but just getting people in the same room together
and considering what they might do.
Darney: Right. And I think the retreats for the new faculty that you did I think are really
important, because then they see themselves in some way as kind of a group, and at least they
come on campus in September and they know X number of people besides the current faculty
who are there participating in it.
Taylor: But even not just new faculty.
Darney: Oh, I know.
Taylor: The whole business of retreats is gone. And that was not just for new faculty but we
used to go off, and you’d play poker in the middle of the night or whatever, but you met with
people about curriculum planning.
Darney: Among other things.
Taylor: Among other things, yes. I remember going to Pack Forest, I remember going to Fort
Worden.

Darney: And the Latvian Center, all those places. But Barbara was insistent on that. Barbara
was also behind the ski trip and the trip to Harrison Hot Springs. Barbara really understood
skits and drama.
Taylor: And being together, making it the right thing to do and paying for it. And as soon as
there become budget crunches, those things go, which is very, very sad . . .
Darney: It’s counterproductive, yeah.
Taylor: . . . because those things are not incidental and they’re not extraneous.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: The same way with the deans, the deans’ team. We’ve talked about that in the past
[that] when you and I were deans, there was a camaraderie among the team. That meant that
things hummed along.
Darney: Right. But I think all of those things are acknowledgment that there’s something
beyond just the work that’s in front of you. And if you do all those things, it makes the work go
better, but it’s not about the work.
For example, every week I toured the Library Building. I would go visit. I’d go chat with
people in Financial Aid. Kitty [Parker] in Advising and Andrea [Coker-Anderson] in Registration
and Records and I had weekly meetings to talk about, what programs do you hear are having
trouble? So you keep track of that. I did all of that.
Taylor: But when you started, you said your responsibility was to get the catalog out. But your
other responsibility was maintenance, it was making it work during the year.
Darney: But I see the ultimate goal is getting the catalog out, but these are all things that lead
to that.
Taylor: They lead to it, but then after you’ve got it, you still saw your role as making it work.
Darney: Well, and doing it for next year, yes.
Taylor: Making what you designed work, constantly.
Darney: Right. Well, you nurture it. You pay attention to it all.
Taylor: Pampering it, nurturing it, and paying attention to teams.
Darney: And you go to the CAB so people see you for lunch. And somebody asks you a
question on how it takes a half hour to get across Red Square, that’s all important. And it’s not

wasting time. But I think for the deans, there’s so much work that it’s easy to say, “I can’t do
that stuff. I just have to stay here and write these memos.”
Taylor: That’s right.
Darney: And I think it’s important to see the breadth of the job, some part of it that other
people don’t see that are out there maybe on the edge.
Taylor: I’m thinking back on your comment about the building that you had in Vancouver.
Since you and I left the deans’ area, they’ve remodeled, and they’ve put barriers up.
Darney: Interesting.
Taylor: And so nobody wanders into the deans’ area.
Darney: Because you have to go through a door.
Taylor: You have to go through a door, you have to go by a desk. We used to have people
coming through all the time. It was Grand Central.
Darney: With whatever they wanted to say to you, yes.
Taylor: So the connection that you had with the faculty was constant.
Darney: Yeah, and I think that there’s a danger in trying for efficiency. I think it’s important to
have some things be inefficient.
Taylor: Yeah, but it’s also having designers and architects or whatever that haven’t walked with
the working, yes.
Darney: The client, right. But that’s because they didn’t ask people.
Taylor: They didn’t ask people. And Admissions used to be totally chaotic, and people didn’t
value that. So now they have it all orderly, and it’s cold and antiseptic and it’s hospital green. I
mean, that makes a difference.
Darney: I remember when a candidate came on campus—I don’t even know who it was—who
said, “Boy, your President must not want anybody to come see him.” And I thought, yep, that’s
it, way off in the corner of the third floor. Not on anybody’s way to anything.
Taylor: That’s what I told Jen Drake. I said, “You’ve got to go down and have lunch with
people.” She said, “I don’t have time.” “You’ve got to be part of a team.” “I don’t have time.
There’s so many crises.”

Well, that’s somewhat true, although she is part of a team. It’s an evening-weekend
team that’s she and somebody, so it’s a good team and she’s spending time, so I rewarded her
for that. But those things are more important than they seem.
Darney: Yep.
Taylor: You were dean for six years?
Darney: I think eight. Because everybody has three in the Budget and the Curriculum Dean
are four—’96 to ’04, I think—I don’t know—’94 to ’02? I don’t know.
Taylor: I don’t know, but I think you and I left together and it was ‘02.
Darney: We did, ’02. Right.
Taylor: Because it was after 9/11.
Darney: Right, and then I had a sabbatical, and then I taught the Islands program. That was my
first program back. So ‘94 to ’02, yeah.
Taylor: And I started in ’99. So you were there five years before I came.
Darney: I was there with Rob [Knapp], yeah.
Taylor: Looking back on there, what’s the legacy that you leave behind as far as being Dean?
Darney: Well, I don’t know if it’s a legacy. I feel like things worked pretty well while I was
Curriculum Dean, and I think we did important things in the curriculum, but I don’t know that
that lasted. For example, when we were thinking about the catalog, we involved people in
Admissions in those discussions. I really fought to have that release time for the Planning Unit
Coordinators. Some took too much advantage of it, but mostly—I mean, there was a lot of
work for them to do. And it was a recognition that in the spring, you’ve had a lot of work fall
and winter. We can’t give you release time then, but we can give it to you now when there’s a
lot of work. But I know people didn’t like it, and it’s gone now, and that’s fine. But I think it
worked, and I think the curriculum worked.
Taylor: I think people liked it. It’s just now one of those budget things that they’ve lopped off.
Darney: It’s because they cut their release time? I don’t know. And I don’t know how I would
have fared if I had been Curriculum Dean when the union came in because it changes the way
we work with faculty, and their work life and those sorts of things. So I was glad to avoid that. I
don’t know how it would have been.

Taylor: Yes.
Darney: And I think it’s there for a very understandable and important reasons, but it would
have made—it’s kind of antithetical to the college.
Taylor: Do you think it mattered that while you were dean and Barbara was Provost, the
college was dominated by women?
Darney: Oh, yes, I think it mattered a lot. And Jane [Jervis] was there, you know.
Taylor: Jane was there. Rita Cooper was there. Ruta Fanning was there. Barbara, you, me,
Susan Fiksdal. I mean, almost up and down the ladder it was women. And do you think that
mattered?
Darney: Yes, I think that makes a difference.
Taylor: How did it matter?
Darney: Well, I think that for me personally, it mattered because of my relationship with
Barbara. I felt like she really wanted to help me do a good job. And there may be men who
think that, but not many. So I think that made the biggest difference for me.
Taylor: And she worked well with Jane.
Darney: She and Jane worked very well together, yeah. But the deans really don’t interact with
the President much.
Taylor: No. And it happened that Andrea and Kitty, and in a way, you worked better with them
than—well, maybe a man could have done it, but you chose . . . I think maybe—maybe—
women would have different relationship with staff.
Darney: Yes, that may be. I think I was probably known as the person who liked gossip, so we
would laugh about, well, we’re here, what’s the gossip that you have? And Bill is really good at
that. Bill knew everybody, because people would come to the Library and tell him things. And I
think that it’s underrated as an important kind of glue that holds things together if you’re just
kind of keeping up with everybody, you’re keeping track. And it’s not mean, it’s just talking
about the college, and talking about where we are with that.
Steve Hunter, for example—not the gossip part—I think he really understood the
college well, and was very helpful in the kinds of things that we wanted to do, and figuring out
ways to do them. And Dee [Van Brunt]—I mean, my god.

Taylor: Dee was just an angel.
Darney: And Karen, when Karen was here. So it was Dee and Karen.
Taylor: Karen Wynkoop?
Darney: Yes. They were on top of everything, and they understood.
Taylor: They understood when they could bend the rules and when they couldn’t.
Darney: Exactly. And when you just have to say, “This is it.” I mean, I quote Karen all the time
when she’d say—you know, all these people who wanted to teach in Seattle—“Could you
please have the students come to Seattle?”—and Karen would say, “The job is here.”
[laughing]
Taylor: Yeah, and then they left and lived in Seattle and didn’t do the job, or some of them.
Darney: Yeah, exactly. Then the other thing that she said that was so good was when
somebody said, “You never call me, you never tell me.” And she said, “The phone works both
ways.” [laughing]
Taylor: What about the rotation of deans as a value?
Darney: I think it’s really important. I wouldn’t have done it, if it hadn’t been a rotation, that
is, if I didn’t know that I could go back to teaching. I wasn’t looking for a career change. So I
think it’s really important.
I think it also has this very unfortunate unintended consequence, which is that after
you’ve been in the deans’ area and you see all the kind of scams that people try, if you’re of a
certain mindset when you go back to teaching, you’ve learned new ways to be obnoxious!
[laughing]
Taylor: You taught me some of that, when we used to go to conferences.
Darney: But I knew that before I was a dean! [laughing]
Taylor: You knew that, but I didn’t know that.
Darney: Right. You thought you had to go to everything.
Taylor: Yes, and I was super-conscientious. But not only you won’t get deans that want to be
deans, but the idea that you become a dean and then you go back changes the way you
function as a dean.

Darney: Absolutely. And I think the primary value of the dean is “I’m here to help you do a
good job teaching.” And if you keep that in mind, I think that’s the important thing.
Taylor: And I don’t see myself as lording it over you, and I don’t see myself as moving up a
ladder leaving you behind.
Darney: Exactly.
Taylor: I’m coming back.
Darney: Right. Because, you know, the scorn on the faculty of people who do go on to
administrative jobs in northern South Dakota or wherever he went.
Taylor: Yes, use it as a steppingstone.
Darney: It’s like, well, they’ve gone to the other side. I went to one of those institutes for new
deans after the first year—not before, but after the first year—and these people were talking
about how their faculty friends wouldn’t talk to them and how horrible. And I thought, oh my
god, I would never be a dean if that’s what it took. But they were people who are on a kind of
trajectory.
Taylor: Yes. And I’m afraid that the union ambience is making that the distance between
deans and faculty greater.
Darney: Well, and it must make the deans feel schizophrenic, because now I’m them and then
I’m us.
Taylor: And they’re not allowed to be members, I think, because that’s the way unions
operate, so it has to be adversarial.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: I never felt it was adversarial.
Darney: No.
Taylor: And you didn’t either.
Darney: No. I mean, the old guys at the table—I always ate lunch with the old guys—and they
would carp about, oh, the deans this and the deans that. But half of them had been deans.
[laughing] So it wasn’t real carping.
Taylor: You know who is credited with that rotation of deans idea?
Darney: No.

Taylor: Chuck Nisbet.
Darney: Really? Good for him.
Taylor: Yes, the second year. And it was because of people that came to the college that had
been somewhere else were so anti-authority. They had had such bad experiences with
administrators that that was their way of solving that problem. It was a healthy solution. It
wasn’t based on anger at the current deans, it was “We’ve got to set up a situation here that
doesn’t make us them.”
Darney: Because some people were hired to be deans at the beginning, right?
Taylor: Oh, at the very, very beginning.
Darney: And then what did they do? Did they go back to the faculty then?
Taylor: Oh, yes.
Darney: They all did? They didn’t leave?
Taylor: They all went back. Charlie Teske, Merv Cadwallader and Don Humphrey, they all went
back . . .
Darney: . . . to the faculty.
Taylor: And Ed Kormondy was hired as a faculty and became a dean, then he became Provost.
And Rudy [Martin] was one of the early transfers in.
Darney: But then John Perkins and Barbara were hired as deans from the outside.
Taylor: And when they were hired, it was scandalous. I don’t know if you were there yet.
Darney: No, that was the year I was hired.
Taylor: But the idea that we didn’t have the talent within. Barbara told me that one of the
reasons that the outside deans were hired was dictated by the Trustees. I don’t know if that’s
true.
Darney: Interesting. So it wasn’t that they’d had an internal search and they didn’t find
anybody?
Taylor: They did, and they declared it failed. The Trustees or Dan Evans said, “We’ve got to get
some new blood in here.” There was resistance.
Darney: They were both good hires, though.
Taylor: They were excellent hires. And once they came, it’s like so many things at Evergreen . .

Darney: . . . it’s the idea of it.
Taylor: . . . it’s the idea and the process they don’t like, but the result. It’s like when Dan Evans
got hired, people were horrified. “How could they do this on a Christmas weekend? All of a
sudden, we’ve got this new President, and we didn’t have any process.”
Darney: And Charlie’s out. [laughing]
Taylor: Charlie had said he was leaving, but then there was Dan, who had just stopped being
Governor and all of a sudden . . .
Darney: He wanted a job. He wanted something to do. And he was good.
Taylor: Well, he was better than good.
Darney: He saved the college.
Taylor: He saved the college, not just because of the timing, because we needed a PR person.
Darney: I don’t know. I think the college has to think about—and it does, obviously—how it’s
going to change. Because it has to change. I think toward the end, when we were in the deans’
area, we said, “What are the things that we do that are absolutely crucial that we’re not going
to give up?” I think that’s a useful exercise to do every five years. Do we still really care about
this? Do we still really care about that? Because if people don’t care about it, it’s not going to
happen.
Taylor: Right. That’s why I said about the Five Foci, because that, to me, if you compromise
that—and then the expectations that are layered on top of it. But then you have to do
acculturation.
Darney: Yes, exactly.
Taylor: That was . . .
Darney: . . . indoctrination. [laughing]
Taylor: And you have to spend time and money, and you have to hold people to it. That
business of when a new faculty comes—I still don’t know in hiring if they do their dream
team—but during those hiring committees when people presented their dream team, very
often the second year they got to do it. And the expectation was three or four faculty. That’s
not the expectation now. A three-person team is rare. Sixty percent of the people are teaching
alone is what I heard.

Darney: Oh my god.
Taylor: They not only have to do that if they want students, but if they want to have a college
that has any integrity.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: Or, they need to start over. I’m not so nostalgic about what we did. We did it at a time
when it was good and was done. Maybe there should be a new beginning. Maybe they want to
do something for—I mean, one of the things that’s really obvious is that a huge, huge percent
of the students at Evergreen are first-generation [college attendees]. They have very different
needs and very different backgrounds. Have we designed a college for them? I don’t think so.
Darney: No.
Taylor: They could start by that and create something.
Darney: But my sense is that even the original college wasn’t designed for particular kinds of
students. It was designed for what faculty wanted to do.
Taylor: But it had an assumption that’s false. It had an assumption that all students were going
to be full-time, they were going to be 18-to-22 years old, and they were going to want to get
generally educated.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And that they were going to want relevance. That was where it started, and they had
10 programs, 100 students each. It was much easier to conceive of it than now, where you’re
doing 100 programs and they’re all over the place and there’s no coverage. It’s very, very
different.
Darney: And I think all college students are very different today. They have different
expectations.
Taylor: And the idea that the students are 18 to 22 is [wrong]. It was pretty wrong pretty fast.
But there was that assumption. And you could go off on retreats because there weren’t going
to be students that were working.
Darney: Right, or with kids.

Taylor: Or with kids, yeah. And that everybody was going to be willing to do whatever was
presented. Well, that was sort of it, but the other thing that was early on from the students,
not from the faculty, is that “I can do what I want.”
Darney: Oh, yeah. Man, we fought about that.
Taylor: I still meet people who say, “Well, my daughter came to Evergreen, but left after a
quarter because she didn’t have the discipline to do the work.”
Darney: That’s what I tell people.
Taylor: I always felt that that was not necessary, but it’s about luck of the draw whether you
get into a program, because the programs that you and I taught had a lot of discipline.
Darney: Right. But they still have to be disciplined to do it.
Taylor: They have to buy into it.
Darney: And they have to not want to be told what to do all the time. That’s a lot of what we
see.
Taylor: Right. Okay, where do we go from here?
Darney: I think I cannot leave my Evergreen days without talking about my tennis prowess.
[laughing] When I became dean, before I started, Sally Cloninger said to me, “You need to have
something to run around and hit. Why don’t you come play tennis with us?” So I took it up
after 20, 30 years. We trained, and we were on a team and we went to the nationals.
Taylor: I never knew you went to the nationals. I knew you played hard.
Darney: Yeah, we played, and it’s ability grouping, so we were the bottom ranking. We got
fourth in the nation. We went to New Orleans and played tennis and it was great. It was really
fun.
Taylor: In that line, talk about life at the college, partly social life—what you did—but what was
going on in the world, and how you were involved in it as part of Evergreen.
Darney: Well, because I commuted when I was teaching, I wasn’t really part of Olympia. I
would see people during the week while I was there, and I did a lot, but I wasn’t part of the
Olympia scene until I became a dean, when I then was up there more often. I still would come
here some weekends, but I was up there and the kids were gone, so that was easier.
Taylor: But you developed friendships.

Darney: Yes, I developed quite a few friendships. And it’s mostly—which is the pattern at
Evergreen—people you’ve taught with. Those are the people you know the best, so those were
the people I saw and played tennis with and whatever. But I never met anybody else. I mean, I
met some people outside the college, but I didn’t have friends outside the college.
Taylor: No, neither did I.
Darney: It’s one of the disadvantages of having done that commute, which is, now that I’m
retired, I’m not there. I don’t see those people unless I make an effort, or Kitty and Jeannie
[Chandler] come down and we have lunch or whatever. And that’s too bad.
On the other hand, I found it very nice to be able to get away from the college and be
down here where people didn’t ask me except what I wanted to say. It was like my version of
the college is the one that everybody here knew, and they didn’t have their own. [laughing] So
it goes both ways. I wouldn’t have done it any other way.
Taylor: The other thing you did at the college, you were very instrumental in getting the
women together.
Darney: Yeah, we got the women together.
Taylor: And that mattered.
Darney: Also there was one year when I hosted all the Provost dinners at my house. We did a
lot at that house because it was big and easy to entertain in.
Taylor: And it became sort of a social center, and that was necessary. It was important.
Darney: Right. That’s why I have service for 30 of everything, because people came to the
house.
Taylor: Caryn was living there and she was cook and dishwasher and everything else.
Darney: Oh, man, yeah. We did a lot of stuff together, and both enjoyed it.
Taylor: That was important.
Darney: I think that’s important, and I think that if people feel like they’re too busy to do that
stuff, then they’re really missing the social things.
Taylor: Are there any crises that come to mind that ought to be recorded?
Darney: No, I don’t think so. I mean, 9/11 was horrifying.
Taylor: I mean college crises.

Darney: I know. No. I mean, we went through them all, but I don’t think they were particular
to me or to what I was trying to do. It was just the whole college. The Olander and other kind
of . . .
Taylor: Admissions crises of various sorts.
Darney: Yeah.
Taylor: But your time isn’t defined by those.
Darney: No. And I didn’t have to deal with really problematic faculty—Barbara always did
that—and so that was good. I know when she was a dean, she did a lot of that, but I didn’t
want to do that—you know, the alcoholics and the whatever. So she did that, which is good.
I told Tom [Womeldorff] this, and then I tell other people in administration, that the
important thing I learned about administration when I was a dean was that I had a very difficult
conversation with a long-time faculty member who just made me so mad that I stomped out of
my office. And he stayed in my office and I couldn’t get back. [laughter] So I went down to the
Library and I said, “Bill, you have to call Debbie and see if he’s gone!” And she said after about
20 minutes, he wandered into her office and said, “I don’t know what happened to Jin, but she
seemed kind of upset.” [laughter] So my management skill now is don’t ever stomp out of your
office. Make them leave! [laughing]
Taylor: Because you’ll never get back in! [laughter] One thing we haven’t talked about at all is,
what happened to your scholarship and your sabbaticals and what you did of intellectual
interest? Was it completely confined by what you were teaching and what you were
developing?
Darney: Yeah, it was, pretty much. I maintained an interest in autobiography, as it was then,
and then memoir as it became. That was the focus of my sabbatical, but I also did a bit of
teaching in it, but then that was always my reading.
I tried to be on teams and do reading with a team. Sometimes it worked and sometimes
it didn’t. I remember asking David Marr in the fall of my first year, “What do you do for
intellectual stimulation?” He said, “Oh, you figured that out really fast, didn’t you?” That’s the
problem with the deans’ area, you have to create your own. So I did some reading projects,
people I’ve always wanted to read a lot more of. But you don’t go home with any work. You

leave the office and you’re done. I put in long hours, but I didn’t work weekends and those
kinds of things.
Taylor: But I was always so impressed with you when we did the Victorian program because
you read all that stuff. And it was essential to the program, actually. It was very helpful.
Darney: Yeah, it was good stuff. Barbara would call me up at night about something and I
finally said, “Barbara, don’t call me at night. I’ll talk to you in the day.” She said, “Okay.”
Taylor: Did you only have one sabbatical?
Darney: No, I had two. I went to London in ’85-’86. That was before I came to Olympia. It was
when I was in Vancouver.
Taylor: But how did I know you?
Darney: Well, from the campus.
Taylor: That must have been after you taught in 1984.
Darney: Yes, it was.
Taylor: Because I remember I got your towels from your flat in Highgate.
Darney: Right, you came the next year.
Taylor: What did you do in sabbatical that year?
Darney: I went to SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, (part of the London
University) and I sat in on a South African literature class with this wonderful woman the whole
year. So I did all that reading, and then I did all my own reading in English-language African
literature. Because I had read [James] Olney —who was famous in autobiography studies in the
‘80s—who said that there are no African autobiographies. And I said, well, that can’t be true.
And so that was my project.
It was fun. It was a great year. I took French at the Alliance Francaise. The kids were in
school, and then we traveled. Blair was taking a medieval history class as a 13-year-old. It
changed her life. So on weekends, we’d rent a car and go look at something she’d just studied,
so it was really fun. And people came to visit us, and that was great.
Taylor: And your second sabbatical?
Darney: The second one, I was here.
Taylor: After you were dean.

Darney: After I was dean. Craig was working.
Taylor: What was your center for that year?
Darney: Oh, I don’t know. [laughing]
Taylor: You didn’t have a project?
Darney: Oh, yes, I had a project. I was teaching the Islands Program the next year, so I just
read. I can’t tell you how many people went off in a boat to live on an island alone. [laughing]
I’ve read their memoirs. I did all that, and Sally and I planned. That’s the part I miss. I don’t
miss the students, I have to say, but I miss planning because it is so fun to do all that reading
and kind of go down rabbit holes.
Taylor: I always thought the best faculty development—people kept saying, “Well, you’ve got
to do faculty development”—the best faculty development was being in a team.
Darney: And planning, and doing something new.
Taylor: Doing something new, planning it, and then the faculty seminars. That’s another one of
those values that’s gone.
Darney: I think it’s crucial.
Taylor: It’s not when you learned how to teach, it’s when you learned the intellectual content
of what you were teaching.
Darney: That’s really important.
Taylor: That’s why teams, two is not enough. Three is okay.
Darney: Two can do it, but three is better.
Taylor: But one can’t.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And we never figured out a way . . . people that were teaching alone were supposed to
link up with somebody, but it didn’t ever work.
Darney: No, because then it’s extra work. They’re doing something that they wouldn’t do
otherwise.
Taylor: Right. But it’s pretty easy to get nostalgic about, well, that’s what we used to do and
it’s not there anymore. It’s not there, I guess, for a reason. And I’m not sure we can return to
that.

Darney: Right. But there ought to be some way to keep that engaged. Because accreditors
and all kinds of people that came to the campus said that they had never seen a faculty that
was so engaged. And it’s because you’re always doing new stuff.
Taylor: Yes. But there’s also a criticism. You can do new stuff that’s still within the range of
providing the curriculum that needs to be done.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: The chemist will say, “Well, they’ve still got to do chemistry,” and the math people
would say, “They still have to do math.” Which is true, but you have to do it in a different
context.
Darney: Right. And I think there are people who do, but . . . there are people who don’t. So,
there you go.
Taylor: Yeah. [laughing] New topic: life after Evergreen. What have you done since?
Darney: One of the things I did as a dean was to talk to these old guys who were getting ready
to retire. They all got mad, and I understood that because that was how my mother was.
Whenever she came to visit, in order to leave, she had to be mad, so it justifies leaving or
something. So I saw all these old guys and I thought, oh my god, those guys, because this is
their life and they don’t have a life outside the college.
I found it much more difficult than I thought I would to retire, that first year. So I
decided that you treat it the way you do a divorce, which is you don’t make any major
decisions, and you just kind of go along and see how things are going to be for a year. And then
you kind of think about it. It might have been the year that I was on sabbatical, I saw a thing in
the local neighborhood newspaper about a farmer’s market that was starting. So I went along
to the board meetings, and anybody who showed up was on the board. [laughing] That was so
satisfying. The first year, I was the volunteer coordinator—the volunteer coordinator—and the
guy who was the chair could not organize his way out of a paper bag, so at the end of that year,
I arranged a retreat for the board, and we hired somebody—there’s this non-profit association
here—to come in and facilitate.
Before that meeting I went to this guy and I said, “I just want to let you know that I’m
going to stand for board chair.” He said, “What does that mean?” I find this happens to me all

the time. I think, oh, god, is that an Evergreen word? Does nobody else say that? [laughter] Is
that like DTFs and nobody knows what they are? I said, “Well, I’m going to run for board.” This
was after he’d said he really thought they should hire somebody to take care of the scut work
on the board, and I said to him, “That’s not scut work, that’s the important work of the board
that you ought to be doing.” I said, “I just want to let you know that I’m going to stand for
board. And he said, “Oh, thank god.” So I became chair of the board then for the next three or
four years. And it was just so satisfying.
Taylor: Turns out you had a skill.
Darney: Well, my skill is organizing things. Right? I can organize.
Taylor: You can run a seminar.
Darney: And I can make up a curriculum. That’s been very interesting. And I saw then
something I didn’t know before is that there are people who really like to start things, and there
are people who can maintain them. And they’re different people. He was an entrepreneur, so
once the market started, he was on to something else. So I thought, that can be my role. I can
make it work and I can improve it and keep it going. And it’s really successful, and it’s still
going, and I’ve now stepped off the board after seven years.
The grandkids are in town, so that takes up a fair amount of my time, especially when
they were little. I do a lot of knitting. I do a lot of reading. I was in three book groups at once.
And now I’ve just stepped down as the half-time office staff for Eastside Village in Portland—
where I once again did everything: dispatching rides, welcoming new members, keeping track
of the volunteers. Etc., etc.

End Part 2 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 12, 2018


Virginia Darney
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
April 13, 2018
FINAL
Begin Part 1 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 13, 2018
Taylor: This is April 13, 2018 and I’m in Portland with Jin Darney. One of the things I thought
we didn’t talk about yesterday was women’s studies and how important that was to what you
did in your teaching, and in terms of what was going on in the college.
Darney: I think one of the really interesting and sometimes puzzling things is that there is no
women’s studies area as such at the college. My dissertation was in what would be called
women’s studies, so I certainly integrated that into everything I taught. But my sense is that
the people on the main campus who were working on it saw it as a piece of other things they
were doing, rather than something that stood on its own. Stephanie’s [Coontz] work, for
example, offered Women’s History within the context of history. Peta’s [Henderson] work was
in the context of anthropology and history. So, it was always in everything I taught, but it
wasn’t a specific discipline, if you will. I never quite figured out why that was. In a way, we
offered Women’s Studies across the curriculum, much as we offered composition in Writing
Across the Curriculum.
Taylor: But does that matter? Is that a philosophical difference or . . .?
Darney: I think it’s an interesting structural question, and I don’t know that it matters. I didn’t
feel like it mattered enough that I wanted to initiate an area of women’s studies. But I think it’s
part of the college’s position, which I strongly support, about interdisciplinary studies, and
things are woven all through the curriculum rather than standing out. So I think it makes sense
in the context of the college’s philosophy. And that was fine with me. I was happy. When I
taught film, and when I teach literature, whatever I’m teaching, we put it in there.
That was a reflection partly on just the stuff I was reading that I was interested in, but
also a conscious effort to be sure. I took over a one-quarter, one-faculty course in Literary
1

Modernism, which I really didn’t know very much about because it was not my period. I had
boned up on it, and when I got to the class the first day, I said to the students, “Tell me about
what it is. What’s literary modernism?” They told me. “Here’s the reading list. Who are other
people who are writing and working in that period?” Just so they see the scope of the period.
They said, “Oh, and Virginia Woolf.” I said, “Oh, Virginia Woolf,” who was not on the syllabus.
They said, “Oh, yeah”—and they named the faculty member—“doesn’t think she quite
measures up.”
So, I put her in. And I put in films by women as a way of letting them see what else was
happening in the period, in the ‘20s. So I think, because you control the curriculum so much at
Evergreen, it’s pretty easy to integrate things you want to integrate.
Taylor: But I think there’s a longstanding discussion about, do you have ethnic studies
departments? Do you have women’s studies departments? Do you separate them out, or do
you make them part of the mainstream? I think at Evergreen, it was more likely that you
integrate them into programs, because, as you say, it was easy, and it was irresponsible not to.
Darney: And it reaches more students, if that’s what you’re interested in; people who wouldn’t
take something called women’s studies, but they’d do this class and, oh, they bumped into it,
the way we tried to do with a whole lot of things. You just build it into the program.
Taylor: It doesn’t cheapen it. I think it actually—
Darney: I think what you miss—and I’m willing to miss it—is a sense of this field, and the
theory that goes with this field, and the history of this field, and what are the important works.
The sense of it as this thing. But that’s okay. It’s a loss, but it’s not a huge loss. It’s worth it, I
think, to do it the other way.
Taylor: But philosophically, or in educational terms, it seems like groups have to go through a
time where they’re front and center, like the demand from queer students that there be queer
studies.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And the demand from women students that there be women’s studies.
Darney: Yeah, but part of that is the history of the Women’s movement, the history of women
in America. It came out in such strong opposition to the structure—so, I’ll speak about
2

literature—in literature departments, where you had people like our beloved faculty member
saying, “Virginia Woolf doesn’t measure up.” It’s outrageous. So it was an adversarial
relationship at the beginning, which it has to be to get it involved.
I was really engaged in that period, in the ‘80s, in what were called the “canon wars.”
So, I decided, in a four-credit course that I was teaching in Vancouver, that I was doing to do
that. I devised this whole four-credit course called Considering the Canon, where we were
going to look at that. And the students said to me, “We don’t even know what the canon is.”
So I thought, oh, all right, and I revised everything completely and I taught the canon, which I
couldn’t believe I was doing. But you can’t talk about oppositions to it if they don’t know what
it is.
Taylor: Yes.
Darney: It was quite an eye-opener for me, and quite a reminder of not being able to make
assumptions of our students. And I think people who become academics are people who are
good at school, and they’re now working with people who are not necessarily good at school. I
think that’s a real challenge for faculty.
It brings me to one of the things I wanted to talk about yesterday about the Vancouver
program, where I taught from 1978-1990. When I was in Boston teaching at Pine Manor
College, they started an evening part-time studies program for older women, and I was one of
the first faculty who taught in that program. And they were segregated. They weren’t in the
daytime. It was like this special curriculum that we had for them.
I brought this experience to TESC-Vancouver, working with adults who had completed
the first two years of college, the same kind of students. And it seemed to me that what you
don’t want to do is separate them into “older students,” “mature students,” or whatever. I
always objected on the Olympia campus when they’d talk about the foundation program or
whatever—Ajax for women—the thing that designed especially for middle-aged women. I
don’t think you do that. I think you say, “This is who we are, this is what we teach and
everybody can participate in it.”
Now, I probably designed programs in Vancouver with those folks in mind, because we
must have had three students who were under 30. But still, it’s like this is a curriculum, and
3

we’re here to challenge you, and it doesn’t matter how old you are, or how young you are, we
can do that. So that work in Pine Manor really made me think about what’s the best kind of a
curriculum that will reach everybody, and not just isolate the middle-aged ones.
Taylor: Back to the integrated women’s studies into things, what are books that you found
important to teach?
Darney: I never tried anything twice. It can’t be true, I must have taught some books twice.
Taylor: You must have taught Virginia Woolf more than once.
Darney: No. I think some Doris Lessing that I taught in the ‘90s was really important,
particularly The Fifth Child. I was less successful—I learned pretty early in my career that I
really didn’t want to teach the books I absolutely adore, because if the students didn’t like
them, it crushed me. And if it was a book that I just thought was really good, I didn’t have that
kind of emotional ownership of it. For example, I never taught Moby Dick because I adore
Moby Dick, and I never taught Portrait of a Lady because I adore Portrait of a Lady. I taught
some other [Henry] James, which I think was important.
One of the most successful things I ever taught was is this very short parable—and I
have taught that several times—by Kafka called “Give It Up.” It’s only a few paragraphs long,
and you can spend hours discussing this. Students can really see what you can do when you dig
into a text, and when you really work with a text and think about the possibilities of it.
Taylor: Did you find some books were more teachable than others?
Darney: Oh, yes.
Taylor: And some books that you really wanted to teach over and over again because . . .
Darney: . . . they taught well?
Taylor: Yes.
Darney: I don’t think so.
Taylor: Really? I sure had some of those. You just knew it was a guarantee that it would work.
And, since they were new students, they’d never done it.
Darney: Right. But I guess I was more selfish. I wanted to do new things that I hadn’t taught
before, and experience them in a different way. Louise Erdrich, early on, I think was really
important, her earlier works.
4

When we taught the Islands program, I finally got to teach Robinson Crusoe. It’s hard to
find a program it fits into, but it belongs in the Islands program. Students hated it, which I
thought was very interesting. The first half is boring, I admit, but we taught it for different
reasons. That was enlightening.
Taylor: So it’s more important to teach a book that fits the theme, or solves a problem that you
want to address, rather than a book that is a classic or great?
Darney: Yes, but I don’t think in those terms. It’s not like I think there’s this canon of things
students ought to know, what they need to know it if they’re going to get references. There are
a lot of reasons for knowing it,
Taylor: So you don’t think of teaching in terms of teaching an English major.
Darney: Right, and I don’t think in terms of coverage. I think in terms of learning how to read a
text, and how to explore it, and take a lot out of it and put a lot into it, and sort of what you do
with it.
I would read a book and I could say, “Oh, this would teach well.” And mostly, if it’s
gripping, it teaches well as a novel. And I guess what I want is for students to leave thinking
that novels can be an important part of their life. I thought everybody should know how to
read a novel before they graduate from college, but I was less interested in an American lit
major, or an English major even.
Taylor: So that actually answers, in part, a question that I had. Were there things that you felt
every student should learn, or goals that you had in teaching?
Darney: Yeah, I think helping students be inquisitive, helping students ask a lot of questions,
helping students think about questions that they want to ask. I always did this exercise in
seminar where, before we started talking about a book, we put their questions up on the
board. Then I would divide them into questions that have a specific answer—like “What was
the name of So-and-So’s grandmother?”—and questions that don’t have an answer. We’d get
those out of the way right away. We’d answer all their specific questions, and then you’d look
at the questions that don’t have an answer and that you can really spend time exploring. And I
think for some students, that’s a revelation that you would have open-ended questions about a
text that you don’t answer even at the end. You may have new ideas or whatever.
5

And so I never went into it with “This is what they should know about this text.” And I
didn’t do very much background about “This is the history of the author,” or, “This is the
context in which it was written,” unless I felt like it was really crucial, but mostly I didn’t. I just
let them work with the text without secondary stuff.
Taylor: I know you lectured some, so when you did lectures, what guided you?
Darney: Especially after I taught with Don, but even before that, it was “Here’s what I’m
thinking about this text, and here’s what interests me about this text.”
I taught Middlemarch to these students in Vancouver, and I was teaching with an
experienced Evergreen faculty member who said, “Oh my god! That’s much too hard. You
shouldn’t teach it.” I had already then developed this idea that you just give them stuff that’s
too hard and let them struggle with it. And they did.
Taylor: That’s my favorite all-time book.
Darney: I love it. I don’t have to defend it in front of the students, but I really like it a lot and it
means a lot to me. I still had a student—a middle-aged gentleman—who said, “You know, I
noticed in this book that the milking stools that they use are three-legged, and usually you’d
see two-legged milking stools in that period.” And I just thought, what do I do with this?
[laughter] That’s the level of sophistication, if you will, that some of the students brought to
trying to read a text.
Taylor: So your teaching goals come out of an English major in the sense that it’s not about
coverage, it’s about learning to read.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: I had a list of things, and we’ve kind of covered them—best books to teach, most
important books to you. How about most important books to you, not to teach?
Darney: Well, Portrait of a Lady, because for quite a large period of my life, I believed I was
living that book. And there’s a new book called Mrs. Osmond about what happens after the
end of the book.
My friends and I would sit around and say, “Well, what happened at the end of the
book?” The favored one was that he would just get run over by a bus [laughter] and be out of
the picture. But it’s beautiful. We see the wheels that turn to make things happen, but I think
6

in her eyes, it’s fate that’s what happens to her. That kind of contraposition is interesting; that
what we may think of as just something that happened actually has these causes that we don’t
know about necessarily.
Taylor: And you never taught Portrait of a Lady?
Darney: No, I never taught it.
Taylor: Interesting. So, what’s another favorite book?
Darney: Well, Moby Dick. And I confess, I pretty much skipped the whaling chapters. I read it
for the rest of the text. I don’t teach it partly because when I was at Pine Manor, a guy in the
American history department taught Moby Dick as a way to learn about the New England
whaling enterprise, and it made me weep to think of poor students trying to struggle through
that because of the whaling. So, I like that.
There’s this book by Harriet Beecher Stowe called Pearl of Orr’s Island, which is the kind
of opposition to Moby Dick, that is, it’s the women at home on the island when the men are off
on the whaling vessels. It’s a lovely book.
I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I’m reading more now, of course, because I’m not
teaching. But occasionally I would bring those into the teaching so they were reading stuff that
was new, like The Fifth Child. When that came out in 1981 I used it as soon as it came out in
paper.
Taylor: But your scholarly work had a lot to do with autobiography and memoir.
Darney: My dissertation didn’t. My dissertation was completely American women’s history.
But my scholarly work at Evergreen had to do with autobiography and memoir, so I put those
in. It’s been so interesting to see, not just the writing about autobiography and memoir, but
the stuff that’s published now as memoir. It’s so interesting to see the changes that are
happening.
I got really into it because of the women’s suffrage movement in the 19th Century. They
wrote memoirs. So, they were important historical documents, and some of them were good
and some of them weren’t good, in my opinion, as reading an autobiography or memoir. But
the data that was in it was important, so that kind of got me interested in autobiography when I
was in graduate school at Emory’s Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts ILA
7

Taylor: Did you teach memoir writing?
Darney: Yeah, once. It wasn’t very successful. I didn’t like it. One summer, I taught an
autobiography class that used film and written autobiographies, and then they wrote them.
That worked because they had a lot of other stuff they were doing besides writing their
memoirs. I think it’s very hard to write a good memoir, and I don’t know how to teach memoir
writing, so I didn’t. I kind of let them do it.
In film, they’re often quite experimental, the ones that are autobiographical memoir.
There’s this one called Winnipeg by Guy Maddin that is just astounding. I taught it two or three
times, I’ve seen it two or three times more. I still don’t understand it. I don’t know what’s
going on, which is why I like it. [laughter]
Taylor: For a while at the college, there was a trend to teach autobiography. There were many
programs, taught by different people, very different books. But it was offered every quarter for
quite a long time. I remember Marilyn Frasca did one, and it was called Fictional
Autobiography, and everybody in the class had to choose to be somebody else.
Darney: Oh, interesting.
Taylor: And act for the whole quarter as that other person. It was wild.
Darney: Wow.
Taylor: It was wild, and I think both Marilyn and Craig Carlson acted, and they showed up in
costume of other people, and they had the students doing all this sort of thing.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: Were you ever a part of that?
Darney: No.
Taylor: You didn’t teach autobiography in that series?
Darney: No, that was before I was on the main campus. I think one of the ways it’s natural to
use it is in things like women’s studies and ethnic studies, because it’s people’s stories that are
part of what you’re trying to learn about, that period.
Joy Kogawa’s Obasan I thought, taught very well. I recommended it to a book group I was in,
and it was a flop. I don’t know it it’s the times or the students or what, but I thought it was a
powerful form of autobiography, and really well written.
8

Taylor: How would you describe your interaction and relationship with students?
Darney: I was seen as the kind of rigid, demanding one. At the end of the 1984 program, when
we were all out having a retreat at the end of the program, the students gave the faculty kind
of gag gifts that epitomized them. They gave me a piece of barbed wire. So, I’m guessing, that
that’s how they saw me. [laughing]
Taylor: And that’s not how you see yourself.
Darney: No, but it made me really think, if that’s how they see me. I was approachable. I
often would stop students to inquire about things if I knew that they were having trouble, or
that they were doing something, whatever. But I had standards of things they needed to do,
like turn in their work; like talk in seminar. I demanded that they talk in seminar. And that was
hard for some students.
Taylor: I remember you were always saying that when you taught with Bill [Bruner], Bill was
the program mother.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And you were not the program mother.
Darney: That’s right.
Taylor: And that was a matter of principle?
Darney: Well, every program has a mother. And often, of course, the women are roped into
doing it, so it was such a pleasure when Bill—they were first-year students, and Bill would say,
“Well, if you haven’t done your laundry yet, it’s week four. You should do your laundry.”
[laughing] He made jokes of it. But I think you have to care for your students, which I did.
Taylor: But it isn’t necessarily a motherly way?
Darney: I had young kids during all of this, and I had plenty of people to mother. I didn’t want
to mother those students.
Taylor: David Paulsen said the same thing. He was the mother and Linda Kahan was not.
Darney: I bet, yeah, exactly. It’s personality.
Taylor: You’re right, every program needs to have someone that plays that role.
Darney: Right.

9

Taylor: That’s interesting. Proudest moments? Things that you did that you look back on and
say, “Yeah, that was good.”
Darney: I’m very proud of the Islands Program. I think it was really, really good. It was a
complicated program and it was a complicated idea, and I think it really was successful, so I’m
proud of that program.
Taylor: And it was good because it was carefully planned, and it was a creative idea?
Darney: Yes, and it was transformative for the students. I think what makes success at
Evergreen for faculty and students is a faculty team that plans things and structures things in
such a way that the students then just take off and do it. So, you’re not there all the time
telling them what to do, but you build it in such a way that they can succeed, but they also have
advanced their learning. I think that takes a lot of planning.
For example, my first experience in team teaching was a course on the History of
Childood at Pine Manor. Our final exam listed all the books that they’d read in the order that
they’d read them. Then the exam question was, “Put these books in a different order, and talk
about how the course would have been different.” That is a brilliant—and my colleague Vera
thought of that—way to think about how you’re learning what you’re learning, what difference
it makes that this book comes after that book instead of before it.
Because I always talked with students about how the books talked to each other in a
program, and the fact that you read A before B makes B look different than if you’d read it in
the opposite order. So that they see—and I don’t know why it was important to me that they
understood this, but it really was—that they understand that the program is a construction. It
isn’t just handed down by god and it has to be this way, but faculty worked together to think
about how to put this together, and how to structure it so that you and the students are
thinking about the questions you need to be thinking about.
I think the reason it’s important is that that is what they need to be doing with their own
education is having that same kind of consciousness, stepping outside of it and looking at it, and
thinking what they’re doing, and what they’re putting together and how it works, rather than
just, oh, this looks good, I’ll take this. We do a bit of that, but you don’t want that.

10

Taylor: This is kind of a leading question, but what does the college do to make that kind of
curriculum possible, and as dean, what did you do?
Darney: The college doesn’t do much to make that possible, except that it puts people
together and says, “You can do whatever you want.”
But I think that, for example, the Danforth Fellowships were a way to get at that
question, you know. How do you do this? If Sally Cloninger had had a Danforth, and could talk
to people about designing projects within their programs, it would have been fabulous. I think
those are the kinds of things we learned from each other, and that’s why we team teach so that
we learn from each other.
As a dean, I really supported the retreats. I supported the design-a-program-in-an-hour
kind of thing and helped people work through that. I talked with faculty in my deans’ group,
but also new faculty about ways to think about designing a program. And I think a lot of people
feel constrictions that aren’t there.
For example, Sally had done an Islands program before with Phil Harding—maybe just
Phil—earlier, and so she had a kind of structure, but she and I did a lot of different things.
People would come up to us and say, “My god, that’s a wonderful program.” And we’d say,
“Well, you can do it.” And they couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Now, I know there are family obligations, reasons that people can’t go away, but they
didn’t. And part of what made it work was that we didn’t send the students off; we went off
ourselves, so that we were doing the kinds of things they were doing—not as their teachers, as
people in this program who are doing it.
Taylor: One of the things you talked about yesterday was the joy in the planning. It took a lot
of planning.
Darney: Sure.
Taylor: It didn’t just happen.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And I’m afraid that there are a lot of programs with good ideas, and faculty just expect
them to happen.

11

Darney: And they drop it. You’ve got to go deep into it. At the end of the first quarter, we had
a daylong retreat at the organic farmhouse, and students presented their projects—well, we’d
already seen them—about what they were going to do on their island.
But we also had this amazing project. I’d gone to Powell’s and got a whole lot of old,
cheap travel guides, so we gave each group of two or three students one of these books. And
we had a lot of art material there and we said, “Make this into an art piece.” They could tear it
up, they could cut it, they could paint, they could do all this stuff. It was fabulous to think about
travel. And they weren’t leaving until four weeks into winter quarter, so we knew they were
going to be around to do some more work on this. It was a great project. That’s Sally coming
up with this.
Taylor: And that kind of thinking might be the difference between good programs and not
good programs. And also there are a lot of faculty that have a certain amount of knowledge,
and they just teach it.
Darney: Yes.
Taylor: And they teach it well, but they don’t go out on a limb to do that kind of creative work.
Darney: Right, and something that they aren’t comfortable with.
Taylor: Yes. And they feel an obligation to continue to teach what they know.
Darney: Right. But it’s not possible to teach everything they know—or know everything to you
want to teach.
Taylor: No.
Darney: They’re already making choices, so why not make one more choice that allows room
for some other kind of work?
Taylor: And it might not be as effective with students anyway. They teach it, but do the
students receive it?
Darney: Do they learn it, yes, exactly. So I think, as a dean, it was, again, lots of talking and
helping people think about these questions.
I remember talking with a chemist at catalog time who had a program for the catalog,
and I said, “Okay, this is a very clear description. What are they learning?” And the faculty
member said, “They’re learning how to be chemistry majors.” And I just despair, because that
12

is not the point. But the sciences present special opportunities and special problems, and I
think, particularly with advanced work, maybe you let some of that go.
But with first-year students, they ought to be doing something like the Water program
that was a combination of political and environmental studies, and then science and some math
and so on, because that’s how they understand how to think in a field.
Taylor: It you had the deans and the Provost around the table, what would you advise them to
do to help people, I guess, plan or think or teach the kind of programs that you believe in?
Darney: It’s about socialization and socializing. I think you can’t say, “We’re going to have a
party, and come and we’ll talk about this.” I think you have to kind of force people in some
ways by putting them in situations where those things happen.
The retreat is a good example, although there’s nothing that makes people go to the
retreat. But the people who go really get a lot out of it. One of the things I learned was to stop
thinking about the people who don’t do the stuff we want them to do, and to really focus on
the people who would like to, or who already do, and who have things to offer to each other;
and to understand that some people just aren’t going to do it. It’s too bad, and we can keep
trying on them, but it’s not going to happen.
Taylor: I don’t know if this is possible, but do you have any evidence, in terms of student
outcomes or what students get, about whether this kind of program is more effective in the
long run than a traditional program, or a traditional school?
Darney: You mean like interdisciplinary studies?
Taylor: Yes, or these creative programs that really do engage students in creative thinking.
Darney: Well, I think we do. I know just through Sally the number of people who are working
in media—in the film industry, in animation and all kinds of things. They’ve come to it with
some breadth and then they do that. I think that’s the kind of breadth that other schools aim
for with gen ed requirements.
Now, whether we want to become a two-year interdisciplinary school and a two-year
upper-division narrow school, I don’t think so. But that’s one possibility, one way to get at it, to
say, “These first two years, we’re going to have you do all this really broad stuff,” if only

13

because you’re going to bump into things that you didn’t know you were interested in that
we’re going to wave by you.
I think there are things you could do [through the curriculum], but it would take a lot of
work on the faculty part to get to it and support. It has to be a faculty-led change.
Taylor: Yes, and the pressure now to do vocational programs and do STEM, the pressure from
students, from parents, from the economics is not to do that.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: So if you are arguing to Admissions what the college ought to be doing, it’s an uphill
battle.
Darney: It is, and it’s an uphill battle explaining it to parents and to students who think they
understand it and don’t. I would go out on admissions trips and they’d say, “Do you have a
biology major?” And if you said to that person, “What is a biology major?” They have no idea,
but they just know it’s a thing.
Taylor: And I can do it if I go to X.
Darney: If I go to X. I think it’s interesting that I’m now—I guess we’ll talk about this later—
doing work in an organization, which is just as hard to explain as Evergreen is. I somehow got
myself into these two positions where I have to say, “Well, that’s not quite how we do it. This is
what we do,” or, “This is who we are. No, that’s not quite it.” You know?
And how to emphasize the things that we think are important, and say the things that
they want to hear, if they’re congruent, and how to make those things work.
So, yes, I think there is pressure, but I think computer science is a really good example.
In, I don’t know, it must have been the late ‘80s, there was the beginnings of computer science.
So we really ramped it up, and it was really hot for about five years, and then there weren’t any
students. And now, it’s hot again. But you can’t design a college based on changing economics.
What you have to do is prepare them to be able to go any way they wanted.
It’s less true in computers now, but it used to be that anybody could do that—could pick
it up and get really good at it—and you didn’t have to be trained in computer science. You
could come at it from another field, which is typically what happened at the beginning. But
that’s less true now, I think.
14

Taylor: If we had followed student desires at the beginning, we would have had 25 psychology
faculty hired.
Darney: Right. And now we have 25 business faculty. And because of the way we design
curriculum, they keep wafting into the other parts of the curriculum. [laughter]
Taylor: What’s the answer to the question about what the college ought to do? Do you stand
by your principles? Do you change your principles? Do you respond to outside pressures?
What’s your advice?
Darney: We did a number of things when I was the curriculum, which is to try to make the
curriculum not appear to be something that it wasn’t, but try to make it so that people who are
looking for something could find it.
They’d say, “I want to be a psychology major.” And we could say, “Well, in the index of
the catalog, there’s psychology in this program and this program and this program. And after
you do that, you could do this other psychology, which is more advanced. And when they
changed the evaluations to have the credit equivalencies, your evaluation will show that you
have credits in that thing. But if what you want is to come to Evergreen and only make movies,
then you should go to film school. I think we need to be clear to students about that. “If you
want to only do painting, you should go to art school, because we’re going to ask you to do
some other stuff.”
Taylor: So we should hold to that?
Darney: I think so.
Taylor: Because one of the problems now is this huge enrollment crisis. There have been
enrollment crises before, and years ago, one of the responses to the enrollment crisis was to
start part-time studies to appeal to a different group of people, and to try to make what we
teach still compatible with the philosophy of the place.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: I don’t know now whether you advise holding your philosophy and standards constant,
or whether you think you have to bend.
Darney: Well, I think you have to do one or the other very clearly. I think if you’re going to give
up on these principles, you have to just give up and become a traditional university.
15

Taylor: Or something else.
Darney: Right. I still think that the model works, and I still think that it prepares students—in
ways that they don’t understand until they’re out—for whatever they want to do next. But
that’s a hard sell, and I know that Admissions struggles with this.
Taylor: But what did you do, and what can they do, to educate, acculturate, cajole, train, help
faculty believe in it and do it? Because that’s one of the problems. It’s about faculty
development, it’s about institutional belief, it’s about actually caring and not allowing the
values to be compromised because faculty don’t support them.
Darney: I think it is about faculty development, and I think you have to work really hard. One
of the things you could do is to not put people full-time in a program. You can give the new
faculty release time, and have a very structured set of activities that they do in that time that’s
released.
It could be on a Wednesday or sometime when there’s no class. “We expect you here
every Wednesday, and we’re going to not just talk to you about the college, but we’re going to
have you experience the things that make the college work.” They could do program design,
they could do seminars, they could do all these kinds of things, and I think that would make a
difference.
The thing that alumni talk about at the college is the faculty. They talk about programs,
but not so much. They talk about the faculty, and what they meant to them and how they
helped them figure out what they wanted to do or where they wanted to go. I think that
anything we do that supports faculty is the way to go.
It would be wonderful if we had a bit more authority over what faculty do and how they
do it. But I think we’ve decided at this point—I mean, I think the college has decided—that it’s
worth it to have some slop, if you will, of things that aren’t going very well to allow other
people to do the things they want to do. Now, I don’t know what difference a union has, the
bargaining contract has, in this, because it does restrict hours and all kinds of things. But I just
think you’ve got to get the faculty together.
I felt so hampered by the founding faculty when I came to the college, who would stand
up in meetings and say in a deep voice, “Well, in the beginning, this is what we thought.” And it
16

felt like it was really constricting. Until I broke out of that myself, and let them blather on and
do it the way I wanted to do it anyway because they couldn’t . . . you know . . . I just felt like the
history was oppressive of the college.
Taylor: Mm-hm.
Darney: So you don’t want to set that up for new faculty. You don’t want to say, “Let me tell
you how it is, and here’s what you do.” But you do want them to experience it, and make it
their own. And then it may change, and that’s fine. But it shouldn’t change just by inattention.
Taylor: There are principles that exist in the college, and so it’s not a matter of telling new
faculty, “Okay, you’re free to do anything you want.”
Darney: Exactly. “These are the principles.”
Taylor: So the principles have to be held, and they have to be supported, and then faculty have
to be encouraged or allowed to figure out how to make them their own.
Darney: Exactly. But they have to experience them.
Taylor: Yeah.
Darney: You could set it up so that you could have the Five Foci, one a week. It’s like AA
meetings. [laughing] You could have the Five Foci, and let them experience each one, and
think about what it means in their own teaching.
End Part 1 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 13, 2018
Begin Part 2 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 13, 2018
Taylor: We’re starting again on April 13, 2018. Where were we? We were talking about ways
to support the faculty, and what you did.
Darney: Ways to support new faculty, a buddy system really depends on who it is, and there
are some people who are fabulous buddies and other people who just let it drop and never see
their buddy, which is worse than not doing it at all, you know, if new faculty is expecting some
kind of support that’s not there.
Taylor: Can you think of—and you can even be specific about the good examples—of really
good hires that you were part of, and that you could generalize from that would help people
hire successful faculty.

17

Darney: As we were talking this morning, I don’t have any confidence in my ability to hire. I
thought that Greg Mullins was a really good hire, and I really supported him. And when he
came—I just saw him last weekend and he said, “Oh, I remember you put me up at your house
when I first came and was looking for a place.” I kind of watched out for him, which is, I think,
what somebody needs to do for all new faculty.
One of the nice things about being a dean was that we’d interviewed all the faculty, so
that when we had new faculty, we knew them. I kept up with the folks that we hired during the
time that I was there, even though I wasn’t instrumental in the hiring, but I got to participate in
it. I thought that was really important.
I don’t know. I guess the theme that I’m going to think about is it’s all about personal
relationships, and about finding ways to engage people so that they have personal relationships
with faculty and with each other and with students. And I don’t know how to do that. I know it
when I see it, so you could lean on those people, but then they’d end up doing all those kind of
socializing stuff.
Taylor: I think that’s probably the biggest key to success -- this relationship bit, and it’s the
hardest one to control. The inclination is to try to make rules and policies and guidelines that
get people to do X, Y and Z because then it will be better. And it turns out that doesn’t work.
The only thing that works really is the personal relationships that build on getting people to
choose to be a part of the college.
Darney: Exactly.
Taylor: But being a part of the college [is] the key, not going off on your own but having the
creativity to-Darney: And if we could somehow do that in the process and hiring and orienting new deans,
for example, it would be really good. But I think that . . . I don’t know . . . is it personality? Is it
something you can’t really make somebody be-- a friendly, welcoming person-- if they’re not?
Taylor: I just wonder in the hiring if there’s anything that can clue you in that that person is
going to be successful. Because there were some hires that were truly successful, and some,
after two years, left. I guess it’s the same way with students. There are some students that

18

come, and they figure the place out, and they throw themselves into it and they have a
wonderful experience, and there’s others that say, “You know, I just never connected.”
Darney: Right. I don’t know, because I know we’d say to the students, “This is where you take
control of your own education, and you’re going to get out of it”—you know, my EST speech.
[chuckles] And they say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” But they don’t actually understand it.
I think it’s the same with faculty who see what we’re doing, and see the engagement
and the enthusiasm of the faculty that they meet when they’re here hiring, but it’s too—I think
one of the advantages of the early years was hiring people who were mid-career, or not quite
so beginning, sort of early-mid to mid-career, who understood the problems in typical higher
ed, and who were really eager to do something else about it, and were far enough out of
graduate school that they weren’t scared mice anymore about “Am I good enough, and are
people going to like me, and are people going to judge me and can I admit I didn’t know
something?” Because you have to let go of that stuff.
Taylor: It was also the ‘70s.
Darney: Yes, and people were experimental and not—but I think people come out of graduate
school kind of tortured and anxious. I don’t blame them, but if people use Evergreen as a
steppingstone to get another job, they’re going to leave after two years. And I don’t know how
you can tell that.
And I think that there are some people who think that all this freedom will be just great,
and they get there and they don’t like it as faculty, and so they should leave. And I don’t think
we should see that as a failure.
Taylor: Or, they don’t feel the support for their scholarly work, and that’s really what they
want to do.
Darney: Right. And if that’s what they want to focus on, then it isn’t the right place. And yet, I
think our rate of publication, for example, is equal to other universities, because people publish
what they really want to. But some people find that they have to do it by taking quarters off.
It’s not easily accommodated if they’re terribly serious about it. But people publish, you know,
people get stuff done.

19

Taylor: Some people feel very hampered by the college and other people thrive. The question
is, how do you get the right people?
Darney: I don’t think you can if they come under misapprehensions, and they think it’s just
what they want, and then they realize it isn’t. “Oh, I didn’t want that after all.” I think that’s
part of what happens with students, although they’re not as conscious about it.
Taylor: Now we just want any student that will walk in the door; we used to want students that
wanted to come. And now we want to convince a student to come, no matter what.
Darney: Well, but that’s always been true. That’s not new.
Taylor: That’s not new? Okay.
Darney: No, I think we’ve always had to say, “Yes, you can do that.” And their parents don’t
understand. That’s why we have such a high percentage of academic kids, because their
parents get it. But I think if you see college as a training school, then it looks weird. It looks
weird anyway, you know.
Taylor: And 50 years in, the world is different.
Darney: Very.
Taylor: And I think that’s part of it, too. That advice to current deans and advice to Evergreen
now. I think you’ve done as much as you want to about that?
Darney: Yes.
Taylor: I said I was going to ask this question to reflect on. Who are you, and who and what
made you who you are?
Darney: I think my friend, Vera, at Pine Manor really turned me around about what I wanted to
do and what I wanted to be. I got a lot of support in graduate school. I had a baby; walked in
with a three-month-old baby the first day of class. I had three faculty who were very
supportive.
And preparatory, this was an interdisciplinary program, and we went to Al Stone in the
English Department, who had done a lot of work in autobiography, and we said, “We want a
women’s autobiography class.” This was 1972. He said, “You know, I don’t know much about
that but I will help you do it.” And I was ever grateful to him, and inspired to admit what I don’t
know as a way to begin an inquiry.
20

We did the class. We put it together and we taught it. It was a seminar, and he came
and he was great. But the idea that “Huh. I don’t know about this so let’s explore it,” rather
than I have to be in some field where I’m really confident. That made a big difference to me.
Then I think when I came here, teaching with Bill Bruner was really important. Teaching
with Sally Cloninger was obviously really important, as I’ve talked about. Teaching with Caryn
Cline was important. And then, once I moved up to Olympia after 12 years, I felt supportive
from the loose women’s group.
Barbara [Smith] was certainly important to me, both as a faculty member and as a dean.
I think she was so supportive and enthusiastic, and didn’t get discouraged. I don’t know how
she did it. I spent more than one afternoon in her office in tears, and she would help me and
figure it out. The fact that when I left, they now have two Curriculum Deans. It was partly
because I was doing longer days than 9:00 to 5:00, although Barbara made us come 8:00 to
5:00. But still, it’s a lot of pressure, but it was good.
I learned from Karen Wynkoop how to run a good meeting, and I am forever grateful for
that. And I realized that when I was running meetings—like figuring out hiring and those very
tense things—that I had a higher tolerance for discussion and blather than most people, so
when I had had enough, everybody had had enough. And so when I’d had enough, then we’d
move on because I knew that everybody else was ready. And I learned some really good skills
in leading a meeting from her, which has been very helpful to me in all kinds of situations.
I think the deans’ team was a really good one, and very supportive. John Cushing was a
real support to me, and he and I would do a lot of stuff together just because of our jobs, but
also just because I found him so supportive.
Darney: . The deans actually had responsibility and no authority, so the miracle is that we got
as much done as we did by just leaning on people, and appealing to their better nature and
trying to get them to step up. It was made much easier, as I said earlier, with the Planning
Units, and I could say to the Coordinator, “You’ve got to have three faculty providing freshman
seats,” or whatever. And everybody else agreed that they needed to, so everything was in the
hole so they all heard everything. That made it much easier because I didn’t have to then lean
on people individually; the group could say, “Yeah, we agree about that.”
21

This is now off the track, but it was hard for me to learn to say no in a way that was
really clear, because my preference is to waffle and not really say no. I hear my mother’s voice
saying, “This is only a suggestion, but let’s not forget who’s making it.” [laughter] That didn’t
work. So I had to learn to say upright, “No, we can’t do that.” And when students would come
in with complaints, I would listen, and then I would say, “You’re not going to want to hear this,
but I can’t do that for you,” or, “You can’t do that.”
Taylor: But you had a reputation of being clearheaded and respected, so people would
respond to you.
Darney: Evidently
Taylor: That was the kind of leadership that was necessary and worked. That worked. It
wasn’t that you were a bureaucratic no/yes person, it was “Jin really is pushing me to do this,
and it looks like the right thing, so I guess I’ll do it.”
Darney: Right. And you try to be respectful of them, but also grateful that they’d stepped up
to help. It bleeds over with the work I do now in a non-profit that creates community for
seniors and offers volunteer services where I’m asking these drivers, “Will you take this
person?” When they say, “No, I can’t,” I always say, “Not to worry. Thank you very much.
Thank you for letting me know.” I don’t ever harp on them for “How come you’re not doing
this stuff?”
Taylor: But you’re in a different world when it’s volunteers.
Darney: Well, but there’s a lot of ways that the faculty are volunteers. [laughter] They’re
doing things voluntarily, and you have to then recognize when they do something that steps up
and really helps. I try to keep that in mind.
Taylor: And you have to support them.
Darney: The other thing that I thought was important about our deans’ team, and I think it’s
important in general—and it’s kind of embarrassing to say it—but it’s really important for the
deans to have a place that you can just let your hair down and say awful things about people.
Because then, it’s in that room and it doesn’t go out of that room, and you get it off your chest.
You just need to vent about something, and that’s a really good place to do it, if it doesn’t carry
outside the room and if it doesn’t affect the way other deans react to that person.
22

And a thing I learned about teaching, but it’s true about being a dean, too, is that people
that I couldn’t really get along with, or students I couldn’t get along with, invariably somebody
else on the team could. That was helpful to say, “There’s certain folks I can work with that you
can’t, and so I will.” But not everybody fits with everybody.
I was at an alumni event in D.C. and somebody came up—and they always come up and
say, “Where’s So-and-So?”—and it was early grads, and somebody asked about this faculty
member who I thought was a terrible teacher, and was a lot of trouble for me and I just really
resented him. The student said, “God, he was such a great teacher.” So I thought, okay, he’s
not all bad. He’s offering something to that student that was really important, and so it made
me back off about being too judgmental.
Taylor: One of the things we haven’t talked about at all and I think you were a big part of it—
and inevitably, by scale, it’s dropped out—and that is faculty evaluation, the whole system.
How important was that, and how did you carry it out?
Darney: When I started at Evergreen we were doing them every three years and I just modeled
myself on Barbara, who had done it for me as a fact that she was our dean in Vancouver. It’s a
chance to really talk to a faculty member and to try to be helpful, and to let them vent or [tell
you] things they’re worried about. It has to be a safe space, and I felt like it really was.
It makes you nervous [that] you’re going to be evaluated, but I tried to see it as a
development opportunity for faculty, and I think it’s really important. I visited classes, and then
when it all changed, we didn’t do that anymore. I think that was a big loss. Those groups of
people sitting around about the thing we don’t call tenure, they’re a joke. I would always be
the one who would have to prompt the group to say something negative about the person, and
to just notice holes in what they were doing. Or, ‘What about those kind of evaluations?” Or,
“What about the fact that you didn’t do those evaluations?”
Faculty did not take that responsibility. Well, if there’s a dean there who will, then
maybe it’s okay.
Taylor: Can you tell the history about how that evaluation system changed? Because you came
in when there were three-year contracts, and every single faculty had to write a self-evaluation;

23

the dean met with them and the dean wrote an evaluation back. And I think all of those dean
evaluations were public.
Darney: Yes, and it was a wonderful way to learn about the college, by reading the dean’s
portfolio, because you saw all the things that the dean had said to those people.
Well, a faculty member sued who did not get a second three-year contract. It went to
some legal body that said, “You have tenure already.” So then we switched to . . . was there
something in between? . . . yes, there was. We switched to eight-year contracts? No, because
it was tenure.
Taylor: Eight-year contracts was right.
Darney: There were eight-year contracts with spots in between where you evaluated them.
And then they went to this panel that gives you tenure.
Taylor: The conversion panel.
Darney: The conversion panels, yeah.
Taylor: Who decided it and how was it implemented?
Darney: I don’t know.
Taylor: I remember that it was a three-year conversion, and after that, it was a five-year
portfolio that you were supposed to put together. I remember that the conversion panels were
done by the deans, and I, as the Faculty Development Dean, was not allowed on any conversion
panels because I was to be supportive of the new faculty rather than having a role in whether
the faculty should be promoted.
Darney: It was to separate the roles, right.
Taylor: And then I did the five-year plans, the portfolio reviews, which, as you say, sometimes
they were very good for good faculty who had a time to reflect, and had a time for their
colleagues to say good things.
Darney: And I know there are teams that don’t do end-of-year evaluation exchanges. Because
I would be on a team and say, “Well, when are we going to do that?” And they’d say, “Oh, we
don’t do that.” It’s like, well, yes, we do.
Taylor: But those are the sorts of things that made the college work, and then they have now
eroded. How much of that can you let go and still have the college?
24

Darney: Right. I think until faculty are willing to hold each other responsible—on a team, or
whatever they have instead of Planning Units now—it’s not going to work. Because faculty
have to be willing to just say things to each other that are helpful, but also may be critical.
Taylor: Were you a part of the time that Planning Units got established; that we moved from
specialty areas to Planning Units?
Darney: Yes
Taylor: Do you remember the impetus for that, and how that came about?
Darney: There were too many specialty areas. You couldn’t design a curriculum because there
were all these little satellites everywhere. It was a DTF, but we looked at—I mean, they’re
roughly divisions—they’re not exactly—but then people could choose which one to be in. That
was okay for a while.
Then they started fragmenting, and I think that’s what prompted the next iteration of
how to structure the curriculum. Because, just financially, if you’ve got a release time for your
convener, and instead of having five Planning Unit Coordinators, you’ve got 10, you don’t have
a curriculum. There’s not enough bodies in it.
Taylor: But the creative tension that happened as a result of having five is that there was
pressure to have more.
Darney: Well, it was people who were unhappy with theirs, so they broke off—
Taylor: Now they’re called Pathways, and there are probably many.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: And I don’t know how the catalog gets created.
Darney: I don’t know. The tension is between “I’ve got to fill in the bodies. I’ve got to have
enough faculty to match the seats in the program so, there’s that. But then there’s, what does
it take to make the curriculum be what you want it to be? And that’s the personal relationship
part. You’ve got to be able to do both, and I think that’s really tricky.
You and I were in the problematic Humanities Planning Unit, which was a pretty
interesting place, but people just did whatever they wanted. There was no sense of coverage.
There were attempts, and people just ignored them.

25

Taylor: But that was integral to who was there, but also into a specialty area that was
humanities, and knew that it couldn’t do coverage. There was no way you could do coverage,
and they didn’t even want to.
Darney: Some people did.
Taylor: There wasn’t a shared view that there even ought to be basic or elementary or core or
beginning things and more advanced work.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: So if somebody wanted to do a program on a photographer, fine.
Darney: They did, right. I think that feels to me like a consequence of what I heard about the
early days, which was that the humanities were the glue that held the programs together, so
they are serving the function of helping make the connections between other disciplines—
teaching writing, doing that kind of stuff—and so then they’re not going to think about
coverage.
One of the things I think in all of this is—and it came out of the Planning Unit discussions
in some accreditation part—that there are some tensions in the college that we acknowledge
and we don’t want to change. And we want them to stay as tensions.
Taylor: You were one of the first ones that coined those words.
Darney: Right. And I think that that’s a really important way to think about almost anything
you do—not just Evergreen, but anything you’re involved in—that there are inevitably tensions.
You have to recognize them and decide if you want to solve them.
Taylor: What are the prevailing tensions that you see in the college over time?
Darney: Between you can do whatever you want and structure, for example; between
coverage and breadth; between . . . we had this whole list of them in that accreditation report.
When it really clicked for me was to say, “Yes, they’re there, and we want them to stay there
because we don’t like either one, we don’t like either pole of the tension.”
Taylor: We don’t want to solve that problem.
Darney: Exactly. And we think it, in fact, is not solvable, but we also don’t want to try.
[chuckles] We just want to acknowledge it and work with it. In any relationship, that’s there,

26

those tensions are there. And if you’re surprised by them, it means you’re not paying attention
to the things that are there.
I don’t know. I certainly didn’t think when I first started going to faculty meetings that
they were very productive. But I think that it takes a bit of standing back and looking at what
you’re doing in your own teaching, and what you’re doing in your area, and what you’re doing
with your students to really understand the college, and to make it work. Folks with their heads
down—here’s what I’m doing—are not doing that kind of stepping back and reflecting. I think
that’s why we keep yammering on, and emphasizing reflection—that it’s a part of learning, but
it’s also a part of teaching—it ought to be—because we can’t figure out what we’re doing if we
don’t stand back and look at it.
Taylor: It’s even a part of administration and faculty.
Darney: Absolutely. It should be a part of what everybody does all over the college. And it’s
those moments in faculty meetings where people were just blathering on blah blah blah, and
Marilyn [Frasca] would stand up and say, “Well . . .” and she’d say one sentence and that was it.
It cleared the air. Everybody agreed. We went on to the next thing. [chuckles]
Taylor: That’s right.
Darney: But it took her seeing the whole of what that discussion was, stepping back from it and
being able to do that.
Taylor: I think one of the inevitable tensions and changes, in the early days, Byron Youtz was
Chair of the Faculty. He was the Provost, but he was Chair of the Faculty, and there were
people that said, “How can that be?” Because there has to be an adversarial relationship
between administration and faculty. It just is. And the college kind of fooled itself in thinking
that, no, that wasn’t necessary, at least at some point, so they accepted it [because] “Byron’s
such a good guy, it’s fine.” But eventually, that came to blows. It was always a tension with the
deans and the faculty, and the union has made that even more pronounced.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: I think you always thought of yourself as a member of the faculty that happened to be
serving as a dean, which is what I did.

27

Darney: Which is how it’s set up. The deans are there to take care of business for the faculty
so they can teach.
Taylor: I think increasingly, that’s hard.
Darney: I worked with one dean who clearly was looking for administrative jobs at other
schools. I don’t want to say that caused that person not be a good dean, but that person
wasn’t a good dean because he was already thinking administratively? I don’t know what it
was, but that person did not see himself as “I’m here as a member of the faculty, helping the
faculty.”
Taylor: But other faculty thought deans were delusional, in the sense that “You’re a dean.
You’re not a member of the faculty, you’re a dean, and therefore you are in a power
relationship; that means that you have authority”—that we never thought we had, but
nevertheless, we did.
Darney: People may have thought that but I sure never felt it from the faculty. I maintained all
my faculty contacts. I heard tales at a New Deans meeting about friendships that ended when a
faculty became a dean; I would not have stood for dean if it meant severing ties with faculty.
Taylor: That’s why the rotation of deans is so valuable, because people come in and become a
dean and they say, “Oh!” And it turns out that they don’t have [authority], and the only way
that have any power or any effectiveness is if they keep their relationships with the faculty.
Darney: Right.
Taylor: That’s the way it’s set up. I think we’re about done, but do you have any parting
thoughts about your life and about your legacy—it doesn’t have to be legacy, but things that
you want recorded about you?
Darney: I just thought it was a wonderful opportunity to be at the college. And if I hadn’t been
at Evergreen, I wouldn’t be in higher ed. I couldn’t have been happy in a traditional university.
My dear graduate advisor at Emory, who had a good friend who was in the history
department at Portland State, would say to me, “In a couple of years, maybe you could get a
job at Portland State.” [laughing] And I thought, he doesn’t have a clue how much my life is
better because of Evergreen. And I would never have gone to Portland State.

28

I just feel so lucky to have been part of it, and to have been there at the time I was. It
was a wonderful experience. Wonderful experience.
Taylor: It’s funny. That’s the closing statement that everybody makes, because it was a place
that let us do important things, and feel . . .
Darney: Right, and not be isolated, and do it with the support of other people.
Taylor: Yes, we were lucky.
Darney: We were lucky, yeah.
End Part 2 of 2 of Jin Darney on April 13, 2018

29



Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

DarneyVirginia_20180412_Transcript_Part1.pdf

DarneyVirginia_20180413_Transcript_Part2.pdf